Ludwig von Mises as a Laissez-faire Radical: The Quest for the Historical Mises

0:00The title of this article, which will appear in print eventually, is called the laissez-faire radical, a quest for the historical Mises. This is, of course, a pun on the famous Ronan book, A Quest for the Historical Jesus, in which he provides the regular view of Jesus' historicity. The point here is that some people think it's a bad pun, some people think it's a good pun, what the hell. Different strokes for different folks. At any rate, the basic concept here was this, that I came to the very strong feeling that the general image of Mises' so-called non-economic views, really, of course, all integrated together, has been distorted, not by any kind of conspiracy, but just essentially the way it happened, namely that most people who think about Mises now think of him as sort of a national review type conservative who happen to be interested in economics, and of course the laissez-faire economist.

1:01It's the national view type conservatism that we'll challenge here tonight, maintaining that he was very much different than that. He wasn't essentially a laissez-faire radical of the early 19th century vintage. It's true that he did not stress these views after he got to the United States. In other words, if you read Human Action or his post-Human Action writings, it's not that he recanted anything, I don't think he ever did. They simply talk about different areas, they talk more about the so-called strict economic areas. But if you go back to his earlier writings, liberalism and nation-state and economy and socialism, you get a very different view of Mises' political views, as compared to the so-called strict economic doctrine.

1:50I'm not going to define conservatism and radicalism now because you'll see what I mean as I go on, it'll be pretty clear. Some of Mises' anti-conservative thought he didn't make clear and it's too well known to really go into, namely the fact that he believed in personal liberty. He believed that personal liberty was required by logical consistency. For if the government began to restrict or suppress a few consumption goods, why shouldn't they continue to go on and regulate everything? So even though he didn't talk about that very much, it was pretty clear that he also believed in personal freedom as well as so-called economic freedom. Also, as a champion of consumer sovereignty and consumer society, he had very little patience with aristocratic conservatives who spent their time belly-aching about how there are too many people on the beach.

2:43that there isn't a terrible, there's so many people around, shouldn't be sort of wiped out, in other words, in favor of a mass market, okay? So I'm not going to deal with that, because those are pretty well known, I think, and there's views on that. Not that they're not important, they are important, just that they're not going to other areas which are less dealt with. War and Imperialism Mises stood squarely for the classical liberal policy of a peaceful foreign policy in opposition to aggressive nationalism and imperialism.

3:30Everybody took a stand in opposition to conservatives in his day and ours. Mises saw that internal peace through the division of labor and freedom of enterprise has as its counterpart a devotion to international peace and freedom of trade. He was proud to call himself a, quote, citizen of the world, a cosmopolite, unquote, in contrast to chauvinist nationalism. And he tabulated classical liberalism, quote, with its unconditional extolment of peace, unquote. And he goes on, and I'm not going to give you all the quotes I have here, obviously, it's deadly to read quotes. He goes on to talk about how the goal of the domestic policy of liberalism is the same as that of its foreign policy, peace and peaceful cooperation.