Max Eastman - Changing Political Beliefs

Changing Political Beliefs

Hegelism is like a mental disease--you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you've got it. —Max Eastman, Marx and Lenin (1926)

Following the Great Depression, Eastman started to abandon his socialist beliefs, becoming increasingly critical of the ideas of Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and G. W. F. Hegel which he had once admired. In 1941, he was hired as a roving editor for Reader's Digest magazine, a position he held for the remainder of his life. About this time, he also became a friend and admirer of the noted free market economists Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, and an ally to the American writers James Burnham, John Chamberlain and John Dos Passos. Hayek referred to Eastman's life and to his repudiation of socialism in his widely read The Road to Serfdom, and, in turn, Eastman arranged for the serialization of the future Nobel laureate's work in Reader's Digest. Later, Eastman wrote articles critical of socialism for the early libertarian publication The Freeman when it was edited by his friends John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt.

Initially, Eastman had supported Senator Joseph McCarthy, but he soon came to believe that the anti-Communist movement was "taken over by reactionary forces." In 1955, his repudiation of the Left reached a high water-mark with the publication of Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. By this time, he had come to believe that the Bolshevik Revolution, "rather than producing freedom, produced the most perfect tyranny in all history." Also in 1955, he became one of the original contributing editors of the conservative National Review magazine.

In the 1950s, Eastman joined the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society founded by Hayek and Mises, and was a participating member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom at the invitation of Sidney Hook. Although his politics took Eastman into conservative circles, he remained a lifelong atheist. In the 1960s, he broke with his friend William F. Buckley, Jr. and resigned from the National Review's Board of Associates on the grounds that the magazine was too explicitly pro-Christian. Shortly after this, he publicly opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Despite his advocacy of free market economics, many of Eastman's positions remained unconventional for a political "conservative." Favoring the self-description of "radical conservative," he rejected the label "libertarian" then being used by political writer Rose Wilder Lane, with whom he engaged in an acrimonious correspondence, and a term which Eastman also associated with the ideas of the writer Albert Jay Nock.