A Libertarian's Basic Repertoire

...What have actually been the conditions of class, status, degree, and privilege in the history of mankind, and what difference does capitalism make...

...At least part of the answer, I think, lies in what Jacques Rueff, in a warm tribute, called Mises' "intransigence...

...he does not have in mind a future fantasy utopia, where each will absolutely count for one and none for more than one, but rather the empirical conditions under which human beings have hitherto found themselves in various societies...

...In any case, over forty years ago Mises provided us with a perspective on the situation: Christianity existed for many centuries before capitalism...

...As an illustration of the power of Mises' thought, however, an example of greater interest to conservatives might be his clarification of the relationship of Christianity to capitalism and socialism...

...That there is an intimate relationship between commitment to a free society and faith in Christianity is a view commonly found among American conservatives, and one that is usually argued for in the vaguest and most general terms...

...As Marx and Engels observed, the market breaks down every Chinese Wall and levels the world of status and traditional privilege that the West inherited from the Middle Ages...

...the reverence for tradition (it was somehow always authoritarian traditions that were to be reverenced, and never the traditions of free thought and rebellion...

...And then there were Mises' scientific achievements, which were extraordinary...

...Even the New York Times, in its notice at the time of his death in October 1973, termed Mises "one of the foremost economists of this century," and Milton Friedman, though from a completely different tradition of economic thought, has called him "one of the great economists of all time...

...In particular it praised that filthy anthill for its "devotion to the mystique of disinterested work for others, to inspiration by justice, to exaltation of simple and frugal lifer I, to rehabilitation of the rural masses, and to a mixing of social classes...

...his real wit, of the sort proverbially bred in the great cities, akinto that of Berliners, of Parisians and New Yorkers, only Viennese and softer—let me just say that to have, at an early point, come to know the great Mises tends to create in one's mind life-long standards of what an ideal intellectual should be...

...The vaunted virtues of aristocracies...

...There was very little of the Whig about Mises...

...But Mises was even more than a great economist...

...Quite possibly the great intellectual scandal (still unadmitted) of the past century has been that the vast international Marxian movement, including thousands upon thousands of professional thinkers in all fields, was for generations content to discuss the whole issue of capitalism vs...

...Whether or not this judgment is true, Mises would never have bothered to make it...

...It was Christianity's very lack of close involvement with any particular ,social system that was in part responsible for its phenomenal success: "Being neutral to any social system, it was able to traverse the centuries without being destroyed by the tremendous social revolutions which took place...

...Each epoch and every party has been able to take from it what they wanted, because it contains nothing which binds it to a definite social order...

...This would largely account, I think, for the somewhat greater recognition that has been accorded Friedrich Hayek, even before his greatly deserved Nobel Prize...

...But, as a historical and sociological matter, the notion that Christianity is particularly useful to proponents of a free society (in reason, of course, and not as a propagandist's trick), and the naive Sunday preacher's ;idea that it is synonomous in actual practice with all elevated ethics, are rendered completely untenable...

...Mises' immense scholarship, bringing to mind other German-speaking scholars, like Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter, who seemed to work on the principle that someday all encyclopedias might very well just vanish...

...Offhand, one would have thought that this acknowledged position alone would have entitled Mises to being presented within the "pluralistic" setting of left-liberal Academe...

...As a utilitarian liberal, he had more respect for the standards by which ordinary people judge the quality of their own lives...

...For example, it is conceded on all sides that in the whole discussion revolving around the...

...Considering the absolutely critical place America has in Western civilization today, it would truly be a tragedy if a few establishment professors succeeded in keeping intelligent young Americans from acquainting themselves with the rich heritage of ideas left us by Ludwig von Mises...

...It was Mises' accomplishment—and a sign of his superbindependence of mind—to have brushed aside this pious "one-just-doesn't-speakof-such-things," and to have presented comprehensively and arrestingly the problems inherent in attempting rational economic calculation in a situation where no market exists for production goods...

...Now, within the classical liberal tradition, distinctions may be drawn...

...It is the battering-ram of the great democratic revolution of modern times...

...It is said that a number of years ago, when Bill Buckley was at the beginning of his career of college-speaking, he once wrote two names on the blackboard and thereby nicely dramatized the point that students in his audience were being presented with only one side of the great world-forming debate between capitalism and socialism...

...Throughout the world, among knowledgeable people—in German-speaking Europe, in France, in Britain, in Latin America, in our own countryMises was famous as the great twentieth century champion of a school of thought which could be said to have a certain historical importance and a certain intellectual respectability: the one that began with Adam Smith, David Hume, and Turgot, and included Humboldt, Bentham, Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville, Acton, Carl Menger, Pareto, and many others...

...Mises maintained that the pseudorevolution which socialism would bring about would be much more likely to lead to the re-emergence of the society of status and the redegradation of the masses to the position of pawns, to be planned for by an elite which would assign itself the title role in the heroic melodrama, Man Consciously Makes His Own History...

...it may well outlive it...

...And riot only is there no reason to assume any intrinsic connection between the two, but the Christian churches in many ways prepared the ground for the twentieth century's almost unanimous intellectual condemnation of the capitalist system...

...When Mises discusses the great question of the equality of human beings in society...

...was ultimately a philosophical opponent of the developing liberal world...

...Anyone familiar with the structural problems with which the more advanced Communist countries are continually faced and with the debate over "market socialism," will perceive the significance of Mises' work in this field alone...

...Only for this reason could it be become the religion of the Roman Emperors and Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurs, of African Negroes and 'European Teutons, medieval feudal lords and modern industrial laborers...

...his courtesy and kindliness and understanding, even to beginners...

...Mises' fundamentally democratic and egalitarian outlook is not, of course, to be understood in terms of belief in some innate equality of talents or in equality of income (about both of which so much nonsense is now being written and, more often, spoken...

...These are standards to which other scholars whom one encounters will almost never be equal, and judged by which the ordinary run of university professor—at Chicago, Princeton, or Harvard—is simply a joke (but it would be unfair to judge them by such a measure...

...102-158...

...Finally, for the serious reader of politics and social philosophy who has never studied Mises my advice would be to make the omission good as soon as possible: it will save a lot of otherwise wasted effort on the road to truth in these matters...

...Mises, who had witnessed the rise to prominence of a "Christian social thought" and Christian social movements that tried to distance themselves equally from socialism and from horrid laissez faire, underscored the continued warfare of the churches against liberal institutions in terms which some may find surprising:"It is the resistance which the Church has offered to the spread of liberal ideas which has prepared the soil for the destructive resentment of modern socialist thought...

...or his Socialism, which remains for me the finest book I have ever read in the social sciences...

...Christianity, moreover, could sometimes be harmful to the free society...

...Finally, Mises contrasts the ethical achievements of Christianity over two thousand years with what capitalism has accomplished in a couple of centuries: "Compare the results achieved by these 'shopkeeper ethics' with the achievements of Christianity...

...here we are talking about two entirely different sorts of human beings...

...Symptomatic of Mises' avoidance of everything he would consider mystical and obscurantist in social thought is the fact that, to my knowledge, he never in all his published writings once mentions Edmund Burke exceptin the context of someone who, in alliance with writers like de Maistre...

...To take an example, Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, at one point cries out: "Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests —in a word, so anti-poetic—as the life of a man in the United States...

...All the elements of radical liberalism are there: first of all, and most basic, his uncompromising rationalism, reiterated again and again...

...Thus, we may be seeing before our very eyes the accommodation of organized Christianity to the next social system, the emerging world state-socialist order...

...And, more surprising, there is in Mises a basically democratic concern and, in an important sense, an egalitarianism, such that this requires special comment...

...What emerges from these pages is by no means a free-thinking attack on Christianity per se: Mises, perfectly content with his own personal rationalist and scientific world-view, looking on allforms of "fanaticism" with an almost French irony and skeptical detachment, could not be less interested in any individual's profession of religious faith...

...Christianity has acquiesced in slavery and polygamy, has practically canonized war, has, in the name of the Lord, burnt heretics and devastated countries...

...For the Church, Catholic as well as Protestant, is not the least of the factors responsible for the prevalence of the destructive ideals in the world today...

...There is his championing of peace, which in the tradition of those nineteenth century liberals most closely identified with the doctrine of complete laissez faire—Richard Cobden, John Bright, Frederic Bastiat, and Herbert Spencer—he bases on the economic substructure of free trade...

...Mises was a complete doctrinaire and a relentless and implacable fighter for his doctrine...

...As far as the caliber and quality of Mises' thinking goes, my own view is that he is able to penetrate to the heart of important questions, where other writers typically exhaust their capacities on peripheral points...

...Instead, he continued his work, decade after decade: accumulating contributions to economic theory...

...Needless to say, the situation has not basically improved since then (unless perhaps in the sense that most college students would now recognize the name of William F. Buckley, Jr...

...No appreciation of Mises would be complete without saying something, however inadequate, about the man and the individual...

...Perhaps most significantly, in the spring of 1973, a Vatican publication expressed its profound admiration of the society that is being built in China, and noted the similarity of many of its values and aspirations to those of Christianity and the social teachings of the popes...

...For over sixty years he was at war with the spirit of his age, and with every one of the advancing, victorious, or merely modish political schools, left and right...

...There is his utilitarianism, taking the end of politics to be not "the good," but human welfare, as men and women individually define it for themselves...

...Mises belonged to the second category, and on this basis may be contrasted to writers, for instance, such as Macaulay, Tocqueville, and Ortega y Gasset...

...The much abused 'shopkeepers' have abolished slavery and serfdom, made woman the companion of man with equal rights, proclaimed equality before the law and the freedom of thought and opinion, declared war on war, abolished torture, and mitigated the cruelty of punishment...

...This is what is behind the continuing American Revolution that Revel talks about, in his Neither Marx Nor Jesus, although he appears to be too superficial to be able to identify it...

...the whole cultural critique that later provided a substantial foothold for the attack on the consumer society—these found no place in Mises' thinking...

...the Cartesian clarity of his presentations in class (it takes a master to present a complex subject simply...

...While some Christian theologians engage in "dialogues" with Marxist theoreticians, others are desperately anxious to prove the relevance of their creed to current problems through all sorts of activism and "witnessing...

...The totality and enduring intensity of his battle could only be fueled from a profound inner sense of the truth and supreme value of the ideas for which he was struggling...

...viability of a system of central economic planning, Mises played the key role...

...Interestingly, this is the same conclusion which Tocqueville finally reaches in his preface to The Old Regime and the Revolution, where he despairs of Christianity's being of any particular value for the free society, because "the patrimony of the Christian faith is not of this world...

...or, for those with a special interest in twentieth century history, Omnipotent Government...

...The thinking embodied in writings along these lines could, it seems to me, be tightened up immeasurably by a reading of the brief section in Mises' Socialism dealing with "Christianity and Socialism...

...The history of pre-capitalist societies is one of slavery,serfdom and caste- and class-privileges in the most degrading forms...

...The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth or Bureaucracy would be a good start...

...and, from his understanding of the laws of economic activity, elaborat- ing, correcting, and bringing up to date the great social philosophy of classical liberalism...

...Mises, then, was radical liberal, in the line of the Philosophical Radicals and the men of Manchester...

...socialism solely in terms of the alleged defects of capitalism...

...How then can we account for the fact that those who managed to take a Laski and a Thorstein Veblen—or even a Walter Lippmann and a Kenneth Galbraith—seriously as important social philosophers somehow could never bring themselves to familiarize their students with Mises or to show him the marks of public recognition and respect that were his due (he was, for example, never president of the American Economic Association...

...In the hackneyed but true and sociologically enormously important statement: every dollar, whether in the possession of someone totally lacking in the social graces, of someone of "mean birth," of a Jew, of a black, of someone no one ever even heard of is the equal of every other dollar, and commands products and services on the market which talented people must structure their lives to provide...

...It is not as if the resistance of the Church to liberal ideas was harmless...

...The name of the defender of democratic socialism (I think it was Harold Laski, possibly John Dewey) was recognized by most of those present...

...Hayek is temperamentally mach more moderate in expression than Mises ever was, preferring, for instance, to avoid the old slogan of "laissez faire...

...Capitalism shifts the whole center of gravity of society ("The World Turned Upside Down," as Lord Cornwallis' troops played at Yorktown...

...It is highly doubtful that Mises felt any of the qualms of liberals like Tocqueville at the Americanization of the world...

...But the lack of recognition seems to have influenced or deflected Mises not in the least...

...Some of my favorite examples are his discussions of "worker control" (which promises to become the preferred social system of the Left in many Western countries), and of Marxist social philosophy (which Mises deals with in a number of his books, most extensively and trenchantly in Theory and History, pp...

...The question of how, and how well, a socialist economy would function, was avoided as taboo...

...One very important one is between what may be termed "conservative" and "radical" liberals...

...It is history made by slave-owners, warrior-nobles, and eunuch-makers, by kings, their mistresses, and courtiers, by priests and other Mandarin-intellectuals—by parasites and oppressors of all descriptions...

...And it is hard to imagine Mises making such a gesture as Hayek did in dedicating The Road to Serfdom "to socialists of all parties...

...the alleged need for a religious basis for "social cohesion...

...We appear to be entering an age of increasing "social" concern on the part of the Christian churches: as an example, after centuries of (at best) utter indifference to mercantilist-created poverty, to imperialism, overpopulation, and other causes of world wars, Roman Catholic bishops meeting at a synod in Rome have expressed their deep concern over "structural" injustices in the international economy, including multinational corporations and the world monetary system...

...This (as well as his temperament, one supposes) helped produce a definite "arrogance" in his tone (or "apodictic" quality, as some of us in the Mises seminar fondly called it, using one of his own favorite words), which was the last thing academic left-liberals and social democrats could accept in a defender of a view they considered only marginally worthy of toleration to begin with...

...How has it been possible that the great majority of economics and social science students, even at elite American universities, are completely unfamiliar with Mises...

...In fact, their attitude towards America would be a good rough criterion for categorizing a classical liberal as "radical" or "conservative...

...For although the social philosophy implied in the Gospels is "not socialistic and not communistic," Mises asserts that the Gospels are of no help to the free society either, being "indifferent to all social questions on the one hand, full of resentment against all property and all owners on the other...

...his respect for the life of reason, evident in every gesture and glance...

...What cultural force can boast of similar achievements...

...In the last decades we have witnessed with horror its terrible transformation into an enemy of society...

...The name of Ludwig von Mises was entirely unknown to them...

...developing the theoretical structure of the Austrian School (which one may read about in Murray Rothbard's very lucid and intelligent little book, The Essential Von Mises...

...the fear of the emerging "mass-man," who was spoiling things for his intellectual and social betters...