Last Skirmishes with the Anarchists

In 1949, Mises had defined freedom by stating that a “man is free as far as he can live and get on without being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people.”²⁴ The crucial word here is “arbitrary”—a term that was left undefined and that the young anarchists had interpreted in their way. In 1963, therefore, Mises set out to give more meat to his theory. He wrote:

The concepts of freedom and bondage make sense only when referring to the way in which government operates.... As far as the government—the social apparatus of compulsion and oppression—confines the exercise of its violence and the threat of such violence to the suppression and prevention of antisocial action, there prevails what reasonably and meaningfully can be called liberty.... Such coercion does not substantially restrict man's power to choose.... If, however, the government does more than protect people against violent or fraudulent aggression on the part of antisocial individuals, it reduces the sphere of the individual's freedom to act beyond the degree to which it is restricted by praxeological law. Thus we may define freedom as that state of affairs in which the individual's discretion to choose is not constrained by governmental violence beyond the margin within which the praxeological law restricts it anyway.²⁵

This elaboration of his position did not dissuade the anarchists, and it is not difficult to see why. In the above passage, Mises gives two definitions of freedom.

According to the first, freedom prevails if force is limited to the suppression of “antisocial” behavior. Mises gives only one example—robbery—to illustrate what he means by this term.²⁶ If this was meant to imply that the use of force is legitimate if it concerns the protection of property rights, then Mises's definition of freedom was essentially compatible with the views of the anarchists, who would merely add that the government must play by the same rules, and therefore cannot obtain its revenue through the violation of property rights. Mises never brought himself to analyze this proposal in detail. His occasional remarks on the question show that he believed the case for anarchism would only hold in a world inhabited by angels.²⁷ But as Rothbard's writings on the question show, he was not that naïve.²⁸

Mises's second definition of freedom was equally unlikely to steer the anarchists away from their orientation, though for a different reason. According to this one, human action is said to be subject to two distinct influences: praxeological law and government intervention. The influence of the latter is presented as somehow adding to the influence of the former. But this does not square well with what Mises said in the rest of his book about praxeological laws. At all times and all places, the impact that government intervention has on human beings is mediated through the laws of human action. Praxeological laws are not “forces” in the sense that human action (for example, governmental action) is a force; rather, they are the relations that tie up any given force in a chain of causes and consequences.

In private correspondence with Bruno Leoni he regretted that anarchist ideas were “supported by some of the most intelligent men of the American rising generation,” but he had a ready psychological explanation at hand: anarchism was a “reaction to the deification of the state.”²⁹

He had come in touch with the burgeoning anarchist movement already in the years leading up to the publication of Human Action, especially through his contacts with west-coast libertarians but also in correspondence with Rose Wilder Lane. His debates with these American radicals had remained fruitless. But after some twenty years, their extreme anti-statism had gained momentum. The best proof was the existence of the Circle Bastiat involving Rothbard, Raico, and Liggio. Raymond Cyrus Hoiles, publisher of the Freedom Newspaper chain, boasted of this growing impact in a letter to Mises, their first correspondence in thirteen years. Answering Mises's contention that no rational man ever proposed that the production of security be entrusted to private associations, Hoiles said:

I happen to know several people who so believe. Robert LeFevre, the founder of the Freedom School, I believe, believes that the market place is the best way to protect life and property. F.A. Harper, Orval Watts, my son, Harry Hoiles, Rose Wilder Lane, all certainly believe the Declaration of Independence is exactly what it says, because nobody can give a man's consent but that individual himself.³⁰

Mises replied in a Hobbesian manner, objecting that in the absence of a monopoly of the use of coercive force, “everybody would have continually to defend himself against hosts of aggressors.” He concluded:

I think you err in assuming that your principles are those of the Declaration of Independence. They are rather the principles that led a hundred years ago the Confederate States to refuse to recognize the President elected by the majority. Wherever and whenever resorted to, these principles will lead to bloodshed and anarchy.³¹

Now this point of view seems to be at odds with the principle of self-determination, at least in the form in which Mises had championed it for many years. Had Mises changed his mind? He had discussed this issue in correspondence from the early 1950s with Salvador de Madariaga in Oxford. In one of his letters, Mises held that Ernest Renan had settled the question “unambiguously” in his famous lecture on the nature of nations. Self-determination is the right of peoples to “decide their own fate.” However, according to Renan a “nation” could be just any voluntary association of persons. What if a subgroup of an existing nation suddenly decided to go its own way? Would this not be an instance of self-determination? Mises was of course perfectly familiar with the problem. He had known it from his native Austria, where the old nation was divided in the late nineteenth century along linguistic lines. Referring to the secession of language communities, he admitted that the case for secession was unassailable on logical grounds. Only brute force could be held up against it:

It is a fact that no ideology has been developed which would have approved of the existence of a state composed of people speaking different languages. In the absence of such doctrine there is no argument available against the ambitions of the majority of a territory's population asking for independent statehood. There is only the recourse to the ultima ratio regum.³²

And he concluded: “To construct such an ideology of states including various linguistic groups is one of the great tasks left to coming generations.”³³ But this conclusion begged the question. Self-determination is relevant only if there are disagreements between individuals and groups on ideological questions. How should secessionist movements be handled at a time when no great overarching ideology exists? The only solution available for classical liberals relied on the principle of self-determination. But when Mises applied this principle to the concrete case of the American Civil War, he felt it had to yield to other considerations of equally fundamental importance:

It is of no avail for the discussion of our problem whether or not we qualify Lincoln's attitude as liberal. In denying to the Southerners the right to secede, the very right on which the existence of the United States was morally founded, he certainly did not behave as a liberal. But there was another problem in the case: slavery. One could argue: The real issue is not self-determination, but slavery. In fact, most of the contemporary European liberals argued this way and sympathized with the Unionists.³⁴

The quote shows how uneasy Mises was at discussing this problem. He just could not reach a clear conclusion. Ten years later he wrote: “When every territory can by majority vote determine whether it should form an independent state or a part of a larger state, there will no longer be wars to conquer more provinces.”³⁵ But still he did not address de Madariaga's argument that the very problem is to decide who should take part in the “independence voting”—that is, who should be counted as belonging to the nation. Mises evaded the issue:

The liberals have always maintained that it does not matter for the people as a whole and for individual citizens whether their own state's sovereignty stretches over a larger or smaller territory. The size of the realm, the integration of provinces whose inhabitants do not voluntarily want to be or to remain integrated, concerns only royalty and aristocracy.³⁶

Mises ended their 1952–1953 correspondence rather abruptly, saying that de Madariaga's point of view was “the most anti-liberal proposition I have ever heard.”³⁷ He put an equally abrupt end to his 1962 correspondence with Hoiles when the latter expressed his regret to see Mises “advocate any form of socialism, or any form of tyranny.”³⁸ But this did not prevent his continued association with other members of the anarchist camp. In January 1964, he taught a course on money at Robert LeFevre's Freedom School.³⁹ This was the same LeFevre who had praised Hoiles's succinct statement of the case for anarchism. Mises even served on the Advisory Board of the Freedom School and eventually also on the Council of Advisors for F.A. “Baldy” Harper's Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) in California.⁴⁰ (A champion of formal manners, Mises was close enough to Harper to address him as Baldy.⁴¹) He also continued his affiliation with Frank Chodorov's Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, which he had supported from the very beginning in 1952. Moreover, he praised the New Individualist Review that graduate student Ralph Raico had established at the University of Chicago (on behalf of a local chapter of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists). He wrote for it a review of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State and seemed to rate it higher than The Freeman or any other journal.⁴²

Mises also followed Rothbard's subsequent writings and activities, often to his chagrin. A 1968 letter that Fertig wrote to Mises probably conveys Mises's own feelings as well:

Among the things which are really disturbing is the case of Murray Rothbard. I enclose the current issue of National Review.... Now he is allied with the New Left. Imagine that! Just a short while ago he was on a Committee that favored Castro and Cuba. It's sad to see a brilliant mind like his go to pot that way.⁴³