Assault with Blunt History.

• Author: Epstein, Richard A.
• Position: Review

A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, by Garry Wills, New York: Simon & Schuster, 365 pages, $25.00

No lawyer can serve two masters, unless he makes full disclosure of the potential conflicts of interest. Historians are--or should be--subject to the same constraint. But in the case of Garry Wills' new work, full disclosure of his dual agenda would be of no avail, because its sole consequence would be to put his readers on alert. Wills' intention is to discredit the full range of antigovernment thinkers past and present by showing how and when government can be a source of good. The fatal flaw in A Necessary Evil is that Wills treats history not primarily as an enterprise for unearthing the truth but as a weapon to pummel his contemporary intellectual and political opponents. His aim is to lump all of his adversaries together and place them on the fringes of social and intellectual life, by branding them as the successors of (to use his categories) the "nullifiers," "seceders," "insurrectionists," "vigilantes," "withdrawers," and "disobeyers" who have dotted our history.

This amorphous group of political and intellectual figures shares what Wills thinks to be the misguided belief that "government, as a necessary evil, should be kept at a minimum; and that legitimate social activity should be provincial, amateur, authentic, spontaneous, candid, homogenous, traditional, popular, rights-oriented, religious, voluntary, participatory, and rotational." I for one know of no person or group that embodies this eclectic collection of virtues, but in these characteristics Wills finds the grist to attack in breathless succession all sorts of people and groups, ranging from Louis Brandeis and Earl Warren (for misreading the Federalist Papers) to the National Rifle Association and U.S. Term Limits (for sins that are almost too obvious to bear recounting).

In taking on this dual mission, Wills writes with polish and verve that makes for lively reading. Wills comes to his readers as a persuasive historian and public intellectual, known best perhaps for his careful and innovative reading of Lincoln's Gettysburg address, which garnered him a Pulitzer Prize. In this volume, however, Wills abandons the rifle for the shotgun and seeks to demolish many diverse targets with a single blast. Unfortunately A Necessary Evil is shot through with major errors, especially a pair of key blunders that undermines its assault on free markets and limited government. First, Wills fails to understand the logic of the Lockean system of rights that he attacks for its supposed zero-sum mentality. Second, he has no grasp of the fundamental tradeoffs that lie behind the construction of our constitutional scheme. His impoverished political and constitutional views deny him a theoretical platform from which to discredit his strongest opponents, even as he employs those views to knock down a series of straw men.

Wills' opening salvo against the antigovernment forces is a cute verbal reductio ad absurdum from Henry David Thoreau: Those who accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least," must necessarily endorse the view that no government is best of all. Wills quickly backtracks because his most responsible opponents argue for limited government, not for no government. But he charges them, falsely, with assuming that "we are faced with a zero-sum game. Any power given to the government is necessarily subtracted...