Our Threatened Freedom

Who Makes History

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 156-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 156

Dictation Name: Vol. L - Part 13 - Who Makes History

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] Who makes history? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

America’s {?} N. ambassador, Jean {?} Patrick, in her book ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’, wrote most tellingly of an illusion common to many of our professors, bureaucrats, statesmen and politicians. This illusion is the idea that vague social forces shape events, rather than people. Ambassador Kirk Patrick telling cites evidences of this very dangerous myth. If social forces create events, then it becomes necessary for civil government to engineer those forces, which will create the desired results. Such a belief however makes people the creatures of forces, rather than God’s creation. It also reduces man to a helpless piece of driftwood on an ocean of social forces. Such thinking is radically alien to our biblical faith and heritage. Our civilization and our country are the products of men of faith and action, who shaped events and set forces in motion, rather than being shaped by them.

I submit that this belief that social forces shape events is a new religion, not sound sociology. I submit also that it is a very damaging faith. It produces pessimism and a sense of futility, it cuts the vital springs of human action, and channels energy into self-defeating concepts. History is not a product of vague social forces, but very real peoples who by faith embarked on great adventures and made great steps forward.

Behind every great age of advance in history we find men of action, vitalized by a powerful faith.

Forces do not exist in the abstract; a social force is the product of a people’s faith in action. It has no existence in and of itself, and it cannot exist apart from a people’s beliefs. Social scientists, in talking about such forces, have fallen into a naïve deification of their own ideas.

History is a human product, not an abstraction’s work. Not surprisingly, these scholars have converted history into social studies to strip events of their human source, and ascribe them to vague social forces.

Such a faith however denies man freedom, and reduces him to a product of vague and nonexistent entities or forces.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.