What Went Right? An Objectivist Theory of History by Robert Tracinski

Charlottesville, VA: TPC Books, 2022
124 pp. $14.95 (paperback)

[E]very thinking man who does honest work in his own field is our ally and is helping to move civilization forward (28).

“Who sets the tone of a culture?,” asked Ayn Rand. “A small handful of men: the philosophers.” Philosophers provide answers to fundamental questions about the nature of the world, how we know what we know, and what we ought to do about it.¹ “Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default,” said Rand.² The philosophers’ ideas spill down into the culture, influencing public discourse, the economy, politics, art, and innumerable decisions of individuals and institutions.

According to author Robert Tracinski, many of Rand’s followers have taken this to mean that efforts toward a better future should focus heavily, if not exclusively, on infiltrating and improving university humanities departments, especially philosophy programs. But, in his latest book, Tracinski argues that the underlying assumption—that cultural change stems from philosophy departments and leading intellectuals—is only part of the story. The increasingly obvious problem with the theory is that, whereas academic philosophy has continued to nosedive, the world as a whole has seen massive progress in many respects. Given this disconnect, Tracinski sets out to answer the question: What Went Right?

First, he considers the arc of the past hundred years or so. From the “Great War,” to Nazi concentration camps, to Soviet gulags, to Mao’s “Great Leap” into the abyss, the first half of the 20th century was a pit of horrors like none the world has ever seen. In the second half, when Soviet satellite states dotted the globe, the threat of nuclear war loomed, race riots erupted, and the New Left championed “ecology”-based statism among other irrationalities, things did not appear to be getting better. But by the 1980s, the world had turned a corner. Back in the 1940s, Japan and West Germany had adopted representative government and relatively free markets, and they were later followed by the “Asian tigers”: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea. Tracinski traces global development through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the gradual softening of Marxism in China, the liberalization of several South American economies, and India’s industrial revolution, concluding that “civilization has not merely avoided a collapse . . . It is thriving” (9). “By my best estimate,” he writes,

somewhere on the order of three billion people—about half the world’s population—are currently on a path toward political and economic liberty, and toward enjoying all of the things that liberty makes possible: a vibrant, innovative culture, a “First World” lifestyle of opulent wealth, and the benevolent sense that success and happiness are the hallmarks of a “normal life.” (13)

The changes have been fantastic. But are they attributable primarily to the efforts of philosophers spreading rational views on life’s fundamental questions? Consider Julian Simon and his major work, The Ultimate Resource, which argued from economic analyses that human intelligence is the source of prosperity and thus, we shouldn’t entertain Malthusian worries about a population bomb. Rather, we should welcome the prospect of more minds solving more problems. “Simon’s argument is nearly identical to the central theme of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,” writes Tracinski (21).

I used to think of Julian Simon’s work as the application to the special sciences of Ayn Rand’s idea, but then I realized that it was not an “application” at all. Simon did not start with Ayn Rand’s ideas and derive his theories from them. He induced his theory from his own observations and from his knowledge of his professional specialty. (21)

The same goes for such pathbreakers as Hernando de Soto and Manmohan Singh, says Tracinski, whose ideas have, over the past several decades, helped liberalize economies around the globe and generate real, measurable, life-enhancing progress. They have achieved what they have by integrating evidence and inducing principles within relatively narrow fields, not by looking to philosophers for abstract ideas to apply in those spheres. This, says Tracinski, “creates something of a paradox for the interpretation of the role of ideas in history that prevails among most of today’s Objectivist intellectuals” who tend “to regard the universities as the only significant institution for disseminating ideas and thus for shaping the culture” (26–27).

Tracinski argues that the philosophy-first view fails to track the realities of human progress not only today, but throughout many historical periods. If we look at a time line of ancient Greece, he says, we see that “the greatest Greek philosopher, Aristotle, comes last, after most of the really important breakthroughs in Greek science, politics, literature, and art”—after Hippocrates discerned that diseases have natural, not supernatural causes; after Thucydides wrote the first scientific work of history, The History of the Peloponnesian War; after Phidias designed the Parthenon and many of its sculptures; after Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles set the bar for Greek drama; after Anaxagoras eschewed supernatural causes in explaining natural phenomena; after Solon reformed the Athenian state and Pericles exemplified statesmanship (60–61).

All of this also comports with how people form legitimate generalizations, philosophic or otherwise: They induce broad principles by integrating a wealth of narrower observations and drawing new conclusions, as Isaac Newton induced universal laws of motion in large part from his experiments rolling balls down inclined planes, for instance.

Tracinski, therefore, suggests a more nuanced understanding of the philosopher’s role in history. Rational philosophers amplify human progress by observing discoveries and innovations, drawing broad and useful generalizations, and using them to defend man’s upward trajectory (much as Alex Epstein is doing today, for instance). By condensing a wealth of insight, philosophers can and sometimes do transmit the ideas of one civilization to another, thereby driving progress, as happened toward the end of the Dark Ages when Islamic scholars—and later, their Christian counterparts—discovered the works of Aristotle. So, it’s true, as Objectivists hold, that philosophy moves history. But it’s also true that history, “the great proving ground of ideas,” moves philosophy (92). More precisely, as Tracinski puts it, “man moves both. The fundamental reality is man trying to live in the world, for which purpose he observes, forms conclusions, takes actions, learns from the results—and starts the cycle all over again” (93). In other words, philosophy is neither the chicken nor the egg; it is part of a “loop”—a ceaseless conversation between thinkers across disciplines.

The static, top-down view that philosophy is exclusively the chicken is useful for describing one phenomenon, says Tracinski: the spread of irrational ideas. These do not integrate new knowledge but, instead, attempt to explain it away and thereby preserve a more primitive view of the world. Because they contradict the evidence, they cannot be induced or supported by scientific learning or through experience with the institutions undergirding civilization. So, whereas good ideas spread in both directions—from the bluest of blue-collar workers to the heights of the ivory tower and back—bad ideas tend to be unidirectional, spreading only from the top down. Contrast postmodernism with the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment, for instance. The former was dictated almost entirely by PhDs, and it gave rise to “wokeism” and widespread cultural authoritarianism. The latter was birthed from the “Republic of Letters”—a network of gentleman scholars and curious tinkerers contributing ideas and discoveries, as with Benjamin Franklin’s breakthroughs in understanding electricity.

According to Tracinski, because many Objectivists have upheld the top-down view—and because universities have remained a breeding ground for virulent, post-Marxist irrationalities—they’ve largely been unable to explain what went right, offering only “grim projection[s]” and “prognostications of imminent chaos and dictatorship” (27).

At the heart of Tracinski’s alternative is the idea that “the deepest explanation of what shapes the course of history” is “the influence of implicit philosophical ideas”(84). These are ideas for which a person has evidence but not yet an explicit understanding. Often, they are un-conceptualized implications of one’s explicit conclusions. For instance, when a person grasps that boiling water evaporates but does not freeze or turn into chicken noodle soup, he is implicitly grasping the broader generalization that a thing can act only in accord with its identity. And he is on the path toward explicitly grasping it. As Rand explained in a seminar on epistemology,

if you state a certain proposition, implicit in it are certain conclusions, but you may not necessarily be aware of them, because a separate, special act of consciousness is required to draw these consequences and grasp conceptually what is implied in your original statement. (86)

According to Tracinski, civilization is spreading primarily thanks to the implicit ideas baked into three influential cultural institutions: (1) scientific and technological education, (2) global capitalism, and (3) representative government. People around the world are pushing to adopt or expand these institutions not primarily because they’re convinced to do so by philosophers, but because they see that these things make life better. However, once they do adopt these institutions, they are primed to accept their philosophic underpinnings—namely, the basic principles of the Enlightenment. For instance,

If people who have been trained in a scientific education then encounter the basic tenets of a pro-reason philosophy, they will regard them as practically self-evident. Although those principles are not all self-evident, they will feel as if they were, because the broad philosophic truths are implicit in so many of the truths that the individual has grasped in his studies of mathematics, geometry, physics, engineering, medicine, and so on. (45)

In broad brushstrokes, good institutions and good implicit ideas go hand in hand, says Tracinski; buy one, get the other free.

However, an implicit grasp of good ideas, although better than nothing, is a tenuous foothold nonetheless. “That which is merely implicit is not in men’s conscious control,” as Rand put it, and “they can lose it by means of other implications, without knowing what it is that they are losing or when or why.”³ Tracinski says, “Bad explicit ideas function to kill other knowledge, keeping good implicit ideas from coming to fruition” (91). Thus, we can think of history as a duel not only between Plato and Aristotle, as it’s often described, but also as “a war between the implicit and the explicit” (92). Or at least that is the case “when philosophers attempt, not to understand and explain the knowledge implicit in the achievements of science, politics, economics, and so on, but to negate it” (94).

Tracinski’s theory has a lot riding on the power of implicit ideas (which he sometimes refers to as “implicit knowledge”), and at times he goes out on a limb to defend their potency. “In a properly functioning mind,” he writes, implicit knowledge

consists, not of unchallenged assumptions, but of real knowledge that one has already validated. And it is also clear how this kind of implicit knowledge can have a powerful influence, how this knowledge is “available” to guide us for thought and action even when the explicit identification of an idea is not available. (89–90)

Certainly, if one already has validated—that is, confirmed the validity of—his “implicit knowledge,” it would be “available” for thought and action—but in what sense would it then be implicit?

Given Tracinski’s goal of illuminating the role that implicit ideas have played in driving recent global progress, readers might expect him to compare and contrast their impacts with prevalent explicit ideas. How else are we to grasp their relative contributions? But the explicit ideas he does discuss—those of Simon, Singh, and de Soto—are ones he also credits for much of the progress. And we should keep in mind that the institutions supposedly spreading good implicit ideas were the result of extended, explicit philosophic debate—and still are. So how much really is left to ascribe to implicit ideas?

There are also issues with Tracinski’s simplified time line of progress in ancient Greece. It implies a philosophy-last view, obscuring the fact that the innovators listed were in near constant dialogue with those we’d today call philosophers.⁴ Anaxagoras was himself a philosopher (known for his rejoinder to Parmenides’s paradox that change is impossible).

Plus, if philosophy is but one component of a “loop,” a never-ending interdisciplinary dialogue—one that today unfolds largely within universities—shouldn’t universities remain a high priority for Objectivists?

Such issues aside, Tracinski’s short book is an intriguing read that will appeal particularly to those interested in the burgeoning field of “Progress Studies.” No doubt, what Tracinski half-jokingly calls “the problem of the implicit” is an important subject, which, he says, “has largely, to my knowledge, remained unexplored by Objectivist philosophers” (84).

Rand, at least, hinted at its importance, saying, for instance, that the innovators of the 19th century were “riding on the remnants of an Aristotelian influence in philosophy, particularly on an Aristotelian epistemology (more implicitly than explicitly).”⁵ If Rand was right that ideas can be held and spread implicitly—and I think she was—then the question is: how? In What Went Right?, Tracinski offers some interesting answers while simultaneously making “the problem of the implicit” fully explicit.

About Jon Hersey

Jon Hersey (@revivingreason) is managing editor of The Objective Standard and holds fellowships at Foundation for Economic Education, where he writes in defense of freedom, and at Objective Standard Institute, where he teaches courses and hosts the podcast “Philosophy for Flourishing.”

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