Locking in Racial Disadvantage in Libertarian Political Economy: The Case of W. H. Hutt and South Africa

Abstract

In their stormy response to Nancy MacLean's book Democracy in Chains, some academics on the libertarian right have conducted a concerted defense of Nobel Laureate James Buchanan's credentials as an anti-racist, or at least a non-racist. An odd component of their argument is a claim of innocence by association: the peripatetic South African economist and Mont Pelerin Society founding member William Harold Hutt was against apartheid; Buchanan was a friend and supporter of Hutt; therefore, Buchanan could not have been abetting segregationists with his support for public funding of segregated private schools. At the core of this chain of argument is the inference that Hutt's opposition to apartheid proves that Hutt himself was committed to racial equality. However, just as there were white supremacists who opposed slavery in the United States, we demonstrate Hutt was a white supremacist who opposed apartheid in South Africa. We document how Hutt embraced notions of black inferiority, even in The Economics of the Colour Bar, his most ferocious attack on apartheid. Whether or not innocence by association is a sound defense of anyone's ideology or conduct, Hutt, himself, was not innocent of white supremacy.

Keywords:

• Apartheid
• discrimination
• history of economic thought
• stratification economics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Hutt was hardly unique in this stance. From the early years of legal racial separation in South Africa there were white opponents of apartheid, primarily on pragmatic grounds, who simultaneously subscribed to the premises of white superiority (Carter 1955; Lipton 2000). Even in today’s post-apartheid South Africa, many whites who ostensibly are sympathetic to the needs of black South Africans commit so fervently to ‘color blindness’ that they ultimately engage in ‘white denialism’ about the continued presence and impact of racism (van der Westhuizen 2019).

2 W. H. Hutt to the Honorable P. W. Botha, 7 August 1981, Hutt Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

3 W. H. Hutt to the Honorable P. W. Botha, 7 August 1981, Hutt Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

4 W. H. Hutt to Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, 4 March 1983, Hutt Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.