Foreword
checked by any criterion but its own, the way of the man who would bear witness to and fight for truth because it is truth is doubly hard. Not only, as in former ages, must he confront the established authorities of the day with the divergence of their acts from the demands of truth; he has to substantiate—explicitly or implicitly—the very title of truth as criterion.
This is the road Frank Chodorov has chosen. As essayist and as editor, on the lecture platform and in his personal influence upon those around him, he has devoted himself to a single end: to bear witness against that worship of the collective which is the omnipresent political error of the 20th century, and to vindicate the primary value of the individual person as the foundation from which all political thought and action derives its meaning.
His firm defense of the value of the individual person is in turn based upon his insistence on the validity of objective truth, of the Natural Law as source and criterion of right and wrong in the relations among men. This, in the atmosphere of the day, is adding insult to injury. Not content with attacking the dominant contemporary assumption that the collective "people," as represented by the state, is the moral center of human existence, infinitely superior to any mere individual person, he strikes at the same time at the positivism and the pragmatism that have made it possible for this assumption to take root and grow.
Frank Chodorov has devoted the whole of his mature life to a struggle against the twin perversions of concentrated power in the state and intellectual irresponsibility in the academy. As editor of The Freeman, Analysis, and Human Events, in his multifarious writings and speeches, in his books—One Is a Crowd and The Income Tax: Root of All
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