The Most Harmful Philosopher

I've read the works of quite a few philosophers and people who think of themselves as philosophers.  All, I think, mean well,  but quite a few had ideas which can be taken to justify people doing really harmful things, often flatly contradicting the intent of the philosopher themselves.

Socrates, Aristotle, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Kant and the other ontological philosophers really don't rate as harmful.  Socrates objection to elective democracy has been borne out by the corruption of the western countries in the last few decades.  His suggested improvement was benevolent dictators. A few dictators have been benevolent but mostly not.  Many of the others wrote about politics too, but their ideas have been predominantly used for good, with a few exceptions.

Locke and his heirs are responsible for the ideology that led to the American political system that worked so well for two centuries.

Descartes, Berkeley, Hegel, Sartre and the other epistemological philosophers are even less harmful.  They're interested in how we understand things.  Their direct effect on the world is pretty minor, although the consequences on how we think about things can be profound.  Newton, for example, figured out what we call the Scientific Method, which is an approach to proof and elimination of confirmation bias.  Heidegger was a big booster of the Nazis, but his own philosophical ideas were irrelevant to their project.

Finally we come to the political and religious philosophers.  There are surprisingly few important ones.   The Abrahamic arc includes Moses, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Mohammed, etc.  The modern political arc starts with Locke and includes many of his disciples, such as Jefferson, as well as other thinkers, such as Nietzsche.  The economic arc includes Smith, Marx, Keynes, Hayek, Rand.

Moses and Jesus were very much men of their time, recognizing what was wrong and advocating ways to improve it.  Both stood against religious institutions being exploited for profit, and were wholly well intentioned and it's hard to find positions in their thought which were directly used for evil.  But their subsequent disciples incorporate some bad thinking...Paul's silliness with the afterlife, and Augustine's with universal conformity--by force if necessary--led to many of the worst atrocities of all time.  The inquisition, the crusades, and much more, including the Nazi horror to some extent, stem directly from Augustine.

Locke, I think, was wholly well intentioned and most of his disciples were too.  American political theory almost entirely stems from his thought, and while there has been lots of corruption, I think it is the opposite of stemming from his or his disciples thought.

Nietzsche is interesting.  Like Socrates, he's an elitist.  Like Socrates, he's deeply interested in the welfare of society, even to the cost of some of its members, including eugenics and a number of other controversial ideas.  Hitler used the germ of his thinking to rationalize his eugenic programs, but he didn't really understand Nietzsche, and Hitler's elites were what Nietzsche would have regarded as lowbrow thugs. An imaginary version of Nietzsche played a role in the Nazi origin fantasy, no more real than Siegfried or the Valkyries or other heroic Germanic fantasies.

Smith and Keynes were scientists, and with Marx and Newton, the only ones on this list.  They figured out how a lot of the economy works and came up with the beginnings of a system to make it work better. Smith was opposed to laissez faire--he understood that a too-free market will promptly be corrupted.  Something similar is the case with Marx: he was primarily a sociologist but he came to a new understanding of the social dynamics of the forces at work in the economy.  One of his lesser ideas has been taken to be the mainstream of his thought and many societies have purportedly been based on it.  It's not really fair to tar Marx with the harm that the ideology derived from this has caused, but Augustine didn't mean ill either.

Friedrich von Hayek was considered an economist by a lot of people, including many bankers and political conservatives.  He was a pretty bad one though...in the face of lots of empirical data, his theories have pretty much flunked.  He wrote an influential book called "The Road to Serfdom" which suggests that political liberalism will lead inevitably to government control of everything and ultimately the enserfment of almost everybody, and that the unregulated free market is the only solution.  As Smith pointed out, the unregulated free market leads only to corruption and monopoly--a much more direct path to serfdom than via liberalism. 

Hayek's contemporary Ayn Rand wrote a series of fantasy novels which have been taken as economic gospel by an amazing number of people, especially on the far right.  Their appeal is mainly to teenagers, desperate to break from parental and societal control. Alan Greenspan was a particularly devoted admirer and through dishonesty, corruption and a great deal of schmoozing, was one of the major causes of the economic crisis of 2008.  Rand's world has no particular bearing on reality and the characters are totally unrealistic.  In particular, in her world, Gresham's Law does not hold and the Efficient Markets Hypothesis does--the opposite of reality.

My ranking:

Nietzsche's ideas were a tiny part of the Fascist horror that killed tens of millions--but being incredibly generous I can only give him 5% credit or so, so he ranks in a distant 4th place.

Ayn Rand and Hayek have killed tens of millions so far and have ruined the lives of hundreds of millions and will kill lots more before they are done.   I give them a solid third place with a real chance to move up.   It's important to recognize that their followers are applying their ideas as they were intended, which is wholly different than what's going on with Nietzsche and Marx.

Marx was only a small part of the communist ideology that's killed about 100 million, and more appropriately applied in Sweden and Cuba and other places, those same ideas have saved millions.  But places like North Korea, and Cuba to a lesser extent are still misapplying his ideas and will kill plenty more before they are through.

St Augustine's ideas have been behind over half of the religious wars that have occurred since his lifetime, 1600 years ago.  He's in effect killed hundreds of millions, in the hands people following a fairly literal version of his ideology.  Lots of others--Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist fanatics, have behaved in ways that fit his ideas.  The Augustinian Heresy: that you must believe as some authority demands or die, is easily the most harmful idea. Augustine himself would have been horrified, and I'm sure would have reversed course had he comprehended.

The Economic Spectrum

The traditional "left" vs "right" distinction came up during the French Revolution, when supporters of the King sat on the right in the National Assembly, and supporters of the revolution to the left.  This distinction has persisted in many parliaments and legislatures throughout the world, including our own.

Trying to put an individuals political leanings onto a simple one dimensional spectrum is doomed to fail.  How we select and replace leaders and representatives (the issue that the French National Assembly was concerned with) is completely different than how we run our economy.
  
I'll define the economic spectrum as half a circle.  I'll define "everybody is totally equal" communism to be at -90 degrees, and "no rules at all" laissez faire at +90.   There really haven't been such societies.  A few communes have come close, probably -80 or so...but every such society has had leaders.  There have been lots of societies that pass through +90, but it can't last more than a few days before someone with weapons and supporters takes over.  The dark ages hummed along at +45 or so--a new bandit or tyrant rising every few months to make everybody miserable. Somalia was probably about +75 in its darkest, most anarchistic days.    Soviet and Chinese communism in their heyday, I'll put at about -30, Korean maybe -60.  European Socialism, with democratically elected leaders, people working for wages appropriate to skill and demand, but a lot of redistribution, at about -10.  

America is the farthest right successful country in the world.  Lots of countries have been farther right, but they are disasters--as will America be if we continue on our present rightward tack.  Chile under Pinochet, Greece under the generals, and so forth.  Here are where a few famous Americans are, I think:  Obama, Clinton, Nixon, GHWB, Eisenhower are all at about +10. Reagan about +15, GWB claimed to be about +10 when he was running for office, but actually governed at +25--very much to our cost. The Kochs and other John Birchers are at about +50, and America will be over if they get more power than they already have. Bernie Sanders about -5. Noam Chomsky is at about -15, Angela Davis -30.

If you ask Americans to rate themselves on this scale, the Gaussian peak is probably about +15 with a standard deviation of about 5. However, if you ask people questions about specific issues--minimum wage, union rights, clean air, health insurance, etc., they'll come out pretty close to 0, again with a fairly narrow SD. This difference showed itself in the recent election in a number of places where they voted in higher minimum wage, marijuana legalization, gay rights and other "liberal" things, yet sent someone to congress who is dead set against all of those those.
 
Obama and Clinton are the most right wing democrats to have been president since the 19th century. Only the bubble presidents: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Reagan, GWB, are to their right.  Obama has done NOTHING to warrant the description "socialist".  The PPACA is very much a pro-business, pro-insurance, pro-free-market piece of legislation.  What came before had many of the bad aspects of monopoly, and in many cases, literally was a monopoly: price gouging, trapped consumers, poor service.

I'm pretty sure that no economic system that's more than about 15 away from zero on my chart can be stable without a pretty ruthless dictatorship. Friedman/Pinochet's Chile tried to be at about +30 and it didn't work.  China between 1949 and 1972 was at about -30 with the same effect.