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The Secret to Thinking—in One Lesson—by Henry Hazlitt

By Walter Donway

May 5, 2022

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A freshman at Brown University, I was searching through the stacks of the Rockefeller Library (“the Rock”) for a book by legendary modern economist, Henry Hazlitt, author of the classic Economics in One Lesson. Most who patronized the Nathaniel Branden Institute book service in the 1960s and 1970s would affirm that the book was their introduction to economics—and have never forgotten its lesson.

I located Hazlitt, but what I found was totally unexpected.

I located Hazlitt, but what I found was totally unexpected. There, on the shelf, was a book with a blue binding entitled Thinking As A Science. This was Henry Hazlitt’s first book, published in 1916, when he was 22 years old. It was the first passion and project of a man who later upheld “economic reasoning” against the unworldly logic of the welfare state, against John Maynard Keynes and politicization of the money supply, and against inflation as a weapon against the free market and freedom itself.

He begins with “The Neglect of Thinking.” Everyone is passionate about the “real problem” with the world, he writes, but the perceived problems are all different. “I, too, have a little evil to which in passionate moments I am likely to attribute all others. The evil is neglect of thinking. And when I say thinking, I mean real thinking, independent thinking, hard thinking.”

He weighs the many conceptions of “thought”—as an idea, a memory followed by another memory, as imagination.…  And he asks how often people think about thinking—about the tool upon which approaching all other problem-solving depends. They throw themselves into problem-solving “without a thought to their own mind, the tool which produces the solutions.”

All of this is eloquently expressed by a man at the age when most are college juniors (he started writing it when he was 20).

Born in Philadelphia at the close of the Nineteenth Century (1894), Hazlitt rather amazingly was a collateral descendant of the legendary English essayist, William Hazlitt (1778-1830). He was brought up in Brooklyn, but had been cast into poverty by the death of his father when he was an infant. (He proved far more fortunate, living out almost the entire Twentieth Century. He died at age 99 in 1993.)

Hazlitt matriculated in New York’s City College, then an extraordinary institution that claims as graduates a seemingly limitless roster of famous names in 20th century intellectual, literary, and other fields.

(I may attest personally that one of the smartest guys I met in my career, Richard Landau, was a City College graduate with wonderful tales to tell about its Stalinist cadres in his day. Dick, like so many others from City College, eventually rebelled against it all, and ended his life on the right.)

I wonder sometimes if Ayn Rand might have owed her definition of “thinking” to Hazlitt.

Hazlitt’s earliest heroes were Herbert Spencer and William James, and he set out to prepare for a career teaching psychology and philosophy. However, he left the College very soon to support his mother, whose second husband had died. So, presumably, Hazlitt, working to support his mother, devoted his free time to writing Thinking As A Science, published by E.P. Dutton and Company in New York City in 1916. His encomium of City College is that it made him conscious of what he did not know and ambitious to learn it.

I have not gone back to the book ($2.89 in the Kindle edition) beyond the introductory chapter. I want to focus on one idea that I discovered in Hazlitt, when I was 18, that guides me still. I wonder sometimes if Ayn Rand might have owed her definition of “thinking” to Hazlitt. She wrote that “Thinking is purposeful mental activity with knowledge of reality as its goal.” There is no evidence of which I am aware of a connection with Hazlitt. But that is the concept of thinking that drives Thinking As A Science.

 

The Crux: Purposeful Mental Activity versus Association

How readily do our minds ordinarily pursue that purposeful mental activity? We have an impulse to think about a friend’s enthusiasm for rent-control regulations. Characteristically, we sit down to think. Our goal is to grasp the nature, operation, and consequences of rent-control regulations.

But what happens, Hazlitt asks, when we do this? Do our minds move forward step by step, guided by the goal of knowledge of reality, dealing with premises and evidence, pros and cons, and intent upon the knowledge that we seek?

This picture is a satire on what minds too often do when “thinking”: Soon, we are imagining our first apartment, conversations with our landlady, our first love affair in that apartment. How little money we had back then. But, today, it still seems we have too little money. It is the fault of the interventionist-welfare state. Would Trump have dealt with it in a second term? Why is my wife so critical of my qualified support for Trump? I hope my wife likes the restaurant I picked for our anniversary dinner. We are, as Hazlitt put it, “woolgathering.”

Half an hour elapses—and where has our thinking about rent control gone?

We fall into the wool-gathering trap even more regularly, perhaps, when thinking about our lives—tough questions. Did you ever set out to think through, say, how to get along better with your colleagues? Or prepare for retirement? Or network to make possible connections for a future job?

Just to make up a statistic (mostly from my personal experience), 95 percent of our time spent “thinking” about a problem, seeking knowledge of reality, is squandered in woolgathering, recollections, daydreaming.

Hazlitt, in Thinking as A Science, writes that the train of logic, if it runs only through the mind, tends to go off its tracks. I do not know that neuroscience, then or now, understands exactly why prefrontal lobe activity—the executive function of our brains explicitly directing our conscious activity—so readily gets pushed around by our external perceptions, memories, and emotions.

But introspection and observation of others indicates that it does—that the “train of thought” has no special priority in the cerebrum, no right of way.

A colleague of mine said; “I can’t think without a yellow legal pad and a pen in my hand.”

A colleague of mine said; “I can’t think without a yellow legal pad and a pen in my hand.”

Hazlitt’s message, prescient for his time, was that thinking rarely remains on track without a prop out in the world to anchor it.

Hazlitt put it in a way I have never forgotten. If you do not have at hand a pad and pencil, then you must speak aloud, articulating every mental step. If you are speaking your thought process, then, when you begin to woolgather, drift off into thinking by association, a bell rings. Because you stop speaking, the purposeful steps have drifted off into mental associations. And, if you are thinking by writing on a legal pad, then, when your mind has gone woolgathering, your pen has stopped. You will notice what you may otherwise not notice that your mental activity has lost its purpose. Of course, the great discipline for thinking is writing and Hazlitt devotes a chapter to it. Again, it is a prop. I am writing an explanation of Hazlitt’s concept of thinking…but nothing has appeared on the screen for a minute or two. Oops, I am daydreaming about a girl I met years ago at the Rock.

 

Thinking and the Mind and Brain

That is the opposition: purposeful mental activity versus thinking-by-association, woolgathering. I sum up by saying that most of us for most hours of our lives are thinking for brief intervals to attain knowledge, but most of the time are drifting from association to association.

What could supply more convincing evidence for the view of “reason” as a volitional human activity?

What could supply more convincing evidence for the view of  “reason” as a volitional human activity? Unless we initiate mental effort, and sustain it, we are not operating primarily on the conceptual (volitional) level of consciousness. Instead, we are drifting along on the level of semi-perceptual/semi-conceptual consciousness—that is, our mental contents are what we perceive and feel with an occasional jolt into thinking when a question occurs to us.

Here is one of many characterizations of the thinking brain:

“The largest section of the brain and closest to the surface is the Cerebrum…or Cortex. This is often broken down into lobes or sections of the brain: the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobes, and occipital lobe. The frontal lobe is at the front of the head and is responsible for planning, organization, logical thinking, reasoning, and managing emotions. …It is also known as the “higher brain”, “rational brain”, or the “upstairs brain.”

But, as this suggests, and you discover as you read on, this section of the brain is interacting continuously with parts of the brain that mediate movement, memory, vision, and emotions—among other functions. All are exerting an influence; no brain section has automatic dominance. Introspective evidence, as Ayn Rand explained, affirms that in the human brain a volitional choice is required to activate and sustain the frontal lobe’s reasoning, logical thinking, and mastery of our emotions.

This is what Hazlitt is talking about in Thinking As A Science. Reason, logic, and control of the influence of our emotions is not nature’s gift to our prefrontal cortex. The gift is the capacity of the cortex to choose reason, logic, and mastery of emotions. It is not one choice, but a choice we must make at every hour of our waking lives. Hazlitt brilliantly reveals the mechanics of doing so.

 

The One Lesson Applied

Now that we have our one “lesson,” Hazlitt discusses the applications—just as in “Economics in One Lesson” he discusses how thinking not about a policy’s impact on one group but on all groups, and not just in the short term but in the long terms, applies to virtually every debate that arises in economics.

In other chapters he tackles:

  1. Concentration
  2. Prejudice and uncertainty
  3. Debate and conversation
  4. Thinking and reading
  5. Writing one’s thoughts
  6. Things worth thinking about (a list of questions he deems “of great import”)
  7. Thinking as an art (what you read in this book will not apply itself automatically)
  8. Other books about thinking (not merely a list but an assessment; early in his career, he was a celebrated literary critic for the Nation)

Henry Hazlitt, as far as I know, did not espouse a systematic theory of the conceptual level of consciousness. He was concerned with the practical process of sustaining by choice the level of consciousness that is thinking.

The entire process of thinking is guided by questions.

Well, apart from “props” such as speaking aloud and writing, how do you do that? How do you keep your mental activity on track toward a purpose (some knowledge of reality) when that goal is still unknown (you don’t yet know what you want to know)? The most fundamental answer is that you ask questions. The entire process of thinking is guided by questions. Questions name the knowledge that you seek. They describe the purpose of thinking without knowing its specific outcome—and so guide the process. What is the way to invest my money, so it is safe but earns a good return? What should I buy for dinner that will please my wife but not cost too much? What are the long-term economic consequences of laws enforcing rent control?

You do not at least immediately know the answer—the knowledge that you seek—but you proceed by questions and subquestions. And each subquestion may require an elaborate thinking process. That is the method of science.

Very closely related is his discussion of how to define the problem that has motivated you to think in the first place.

 

Conclusion

Do not conclude, because I focus on thinking’s essence, that Hazlitt’s book is elementary or simplistic. The paperback is 260 pages and comprehensive in its coverage, even if not detailed (you can write 260 pages just on logic or experimental science). At 20, the author had striking erudition; there are repeated references to philosophy, literature, and psychology. In his chapter on “method,” he evaluates, for example, deductive reasoning, inductive or empirical reasoning, reasoning by analogy, reasoning from observation and experimentation, and tests of truth and validity.

The book is replete with examples from philosophy, politics, economics, education, and science—among other fields. They often are extended over several pages—necessarily simplified, but not over-simplified. You will find yourself learning from them.

It is almost incomprehensible in our time that Henry Hazlitt for many years was a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, regularly writing editorials. (After he wrote a blast against John Maynard Keynes, he was squeezed out; then, for many years, he was the economic columnist for Newsweek.) And it’s also almost incomprehensible that he wrote a book on economic science in 1946 that 75 years later is still highly popular and entirely relevant. Thinking As A Science, written more than a century ago, is also current and urgent—but scarcely known, today. It has a refreshing, bold style and the amazing lucidity with which Hazlitt explains complex issues.

This book has the potential to change young lives. If it were revived, with an introduction by someone whose name could give it headline importance, it could keep changing minds, changing lives, as it changed mine.

 

 

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