Some books are so penetrating in their understanding of past ages that they become the lens through which all future study of those years begins. A list of such books cannot avoid the risk of idiosyncrasy, but might include: For prehistory, Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade (2007); for Roman history, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776); for medieval history, The Great Chain of Being by Arthur Lovejoy (1936); for the pre-Renaissance, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century by Charles Homer Haskins (1939); for the Renaissance, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jakob Burkhardt (1860); for the nineteenth century, On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859). For the twentieth century the first entry for a book of this kind and stature must be Twelve Delusions of Our Time by Helmut Schoeck (1922-1993).

Twelve Delusions of Our Time is not concerned with specific historical errors – e.g., the mutual treaties that contributed to starting the First World War, the failures of the Treaty of Versailles in leading to the Second – and twelve certainly does not exhaust the list. Its focus is a dozen key recurring pathologies of the last century, all of which share a common characteristic: The emergence of a determining figure not seen before, the intellectual.

Demographics and the general acceptance of science explain the rise of the public thinker for government policy: Millions of people now existed through the practical application of science – science which simultaneously undermined institutions like church and kingship that in the past had provided legitimacy to state power. And now, when the millions who provided wealth that was fabulous in comparison to foregoing ages vastly outnumbered those who held the levers of power, when the discontented millions could immediately cast them down, legitimacy was the indispensable commodity, to be provided by the intellectual.

Certainly there were those intellectuals eager to serve as "the eyes, ears and voice of a free society" organizing itself on the values of pleasure and friendship. But to have influence, to set policy, to stand next to power, there was another class of intellectuals, which we call here the statist intellectuals, which was willing to put its various expertise – whether in law, the arts, science, sociology, economics – in the service of the state.

This list of twelve delusions is in fact a list of the principal means by which the statist intellectuals sold themselves to the state, providing legitimacy in exchange for access to power.

The first delusion, "Elites don’t matter," seems to be a contradiction of the statist intellectuals’ own moral authority. But whether understood as simple irony or as an indicator of some unresolved Jungian contradiction, this delusion in fact enhances their power. By undermining Jefferson’s "aristocracy of ability" – society’s natural elites – by mocking their moral authority and attenuating their ranks, they establish themselves as the arbiters of who is legitimate. Flood the ranks of the natural elites by giving everyone a college degree, and the need for elites does not vanish – instead they are replaced by those bearing the government-sanctioned credentials. As for those self-made thinkers who in the past could just walk in to a place of employment and show their stuff, forget it. The self-taught like Lysander Spooner, Garet Garrett, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, Leonard Read, or H.L. Mencken, or dropouts like Henry Hazlitt are condemned to nattering on some obscure blog.

And yet, as Schoeck emphasizes, no matter how coercive is the state-enforced alternative (here, the state-enforced lowering of university standards after World War Two) in opposition to the long-established natural institution (here, the "aristocracy of ability"), the latter always reasserts itself as an ineradicable need. Schoeck writes:

A similar principle is at work in the third delusion, "It’s art – even without talent." Once again, when everyone including the talentless is proclaimed an artist, it will be those with powerful connections who will receive the most lucrative awards and state endowments, which of necessity can go only to a few. Also, in this delusion another principle is at work, one which seeks to degrade man, to destroy an image of man that is rational, noble, and admirable. Which, after all is more easily led – someone who thinks himself mean and ugly, or someone with his mind furnished with loftier images? And once again, a centuries-old human need – here, for noble self-images – cannot be silenced, even when it must find expression in a perversion, as Schoeck reveals here with a brilliant insight:

Schoeck provides countless examples of the self-contradiction of intellectuals and of claims by statists that are more outrageous than King Canute’s apocryphal command that the tides retreat. Those growing up in state-run schools will not blink an eye when the government claims power to order, with a hubris compounded by its casualness, the employment level, the rate of interest, the survival of bankrupt banks, and Third World development. Schoeck details how these egregious claims, unheard-of before the twentieth century, came to be. Possibly the most glaring example is the hybrid of the intellectual and the politico, the prognosticator. He writes:

The contradictions of the statist intellectuals in the twentieth century have evolved into the Bizarro World of this century, where contradiction is a routine matter of policy. And in a twisted way, it makes sense: For if a policy is determined by common sense, longstanding institutions, and reason, what is the need for a coercive state? That would be redundant, or at least justification for only a minimal state. No, the more outrageous and irrational the contradiction, sedately pronounced as the distillation of wise statecraft, the more obvious the need for force to impose it. The greater the failure, whether in the "War on Terror" or the "War on Drugs," the more obvious the need for greater coercion, not common sense. Thus every state actor, from president to policeman, unconsciously participates in this bizarre moral inversion – not so much because they are evil but because this inversion is the validation and legitimization of their office. Yet this inversion would vanish overnight if the statist intellectuals removed their support. Grover Cleveland would become the model for presidents, and the Sheriff of Mayberry the model for policemen. That the suggestion of these models is met with derision is the measure of the statist intellectuals’ command of the Zeitgeist.

If Schoeck has correctly identified the key Twelve Delusions of Our Time responsible for a century in which governments murdered hundreds of millions of their own people, then he has written a vital book for the twenty-first century: For we have so far been inoculated against none of them.