Fighting for “Freedom”: The End of Conscription in the United States and the Neoliberal Project of Citizenship

Abstract

This paper investigates the termination of conscription in the United States as a neoliberal project to reconstruct national citizenship. It examines how scholars of the “Chicago School” worked towards the termination of the draft through the 1960s, as foundational to their fight for (individual, economic) freedom. In their quest to liberate citizens from big government, Milton Friedman and friends theorized the state's right to take life as a fundamental political problem. Friedman conceptualized conscription as a form of tax, quantified its cost to individuals, and slated its practice to be dismantled. The end of conscription was something of a “first victory” for the early neoliberals, and as such, it was a key project through which they defined neoliberal notions of freedom and models of citizenship. Through debates about conscription, they came to distinguish themselves from both contemporary Keynesian alternatives and classic liberal thinkers. This reconfiguration of the state's biopolitical right to take its citizens' lives for national defense has contributed in important but understudied ways to the contemporary polarization of citizenship. In the context of the broader restructuring of work and welfare, neoliberal “social” policy is increasingly militarized, targeted towards socially and spatially marginal soldiers who work for their welfare. The end of conscription has been a central and unexplored element of the dismantling of “universalism” in the realm of social policy, the introduction of workfare, the militarization of social welfare, and the reintroduction of notions of a deserving and undeserving poor. The conflict with which we have to deal is indeed a quite fundamental one between two irreconcilable types of social organization, which, from the most characteristic forms which they appear, have often been described as the commercial and the military type of society … The army does indeed in many ways represent the closest approach familiar to us to the second type of organization, where work and worker alike are allotted by authority and where, if the available means are scanty, everybody is alike put on short commons. This is the only system in which the individual can be conceded full economic security and through the extension of which to the whole of society it can be achieved for all its members. This security is, however, inseparable from the restrictions on liberty and the hierarchical order of military life—it is the security of the barracks. (Hayek, 1944, p. 131, The Road to Serfdom) Of all the statist violations of individual rights … the military draft is the worst … It negates man's fundamental right, the right to life, and establishes the fundamental principle of statism—that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time. (Rand, 1967, track 2, “The wreckage of consensus”) A personal story will perhaps make my point. Sometime in the late 1960s I engaged in a debate at the University of Wisconsin with Leon Keyserling, an unreconstructed collectivist … He was doing very well with the audience of students as he went through my castigation of price supports, tariffs, and so on until he came to point 11 … That expression of my opposition to the draft brought ardent applause and lost him the audience and the debate. Incidentally, the draft is the only item on my list of fourteen unjustified government activities that has so far been eliminated—and that victory is by no means final. (Friedman, 1962, Preface to Capitalism and Freedom)