An Interview with Ralph Raico

0:00I have with me here Dr. Ralph Reiko, a famed Misesian historian, student of F. A. Hayek, and he's been at the Mises University some years. How many years has it been? Well, I think pretty much since the beginning. Oh, since the beginning of the Mises University. Oh, sure. Okay, that's great. And the topics you pick are mainly historical, of course. Yes, and why do you find this? Of course you have some historians that are studying here, right? It's not just economists. Yes, and people interested mainly in philosophy also and in political philosophy and social theory. I think that the Mises Institute's conception is the same as Murray's conception, which is that there are a number of intertwining disciplines and economics is the best developed, most likely, as far as the philosophy of liberty goes, but there are important connections with other scholarly disciplines.

1:12And historians are particularly, Tom Woods mentioned in his lecture the other night, that historians are particularly bad in their understanding of economics. Oh yes, and bad in general. You know, one of the best things, I think it must have been in the, correct me, but it must have been in the free market, the essay by Robert Higgs, No More Great Presidents, right? Right? And you'll know the exact reference of that, but Bob Hicks talks about the fact that whenever American historians are polled as to who the great presidents were, they all turn out to be the most statist presidents and usually war presidents, the great presidents in the near great. And Bob says, well, first of all, of course, it's a general leftist

2:30The War gives the president much greater scope to exercise his power, to posture, to stand as a beacon of America, freedom, blah, blah, blah. We see it even now that the fact that Bush has declared himself a war president and this This guy who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, got into a cushy position with the Texas Air National Guard, is now a warrior. I mean, we see it, in other words, all around us, but it's historically been the case. Don't you think, too, that if somebody like Bush or anybody else becomes president, I think, well, you know, I want to make a mark on history.

3:18I want to be a big deal. And the historians contribute to this problem, right? Well, of course, of course. They reward these guys. Who are the figures who have made a mark on history? Well, in a sense, the figures who have made a mark on history most importantly and most memorably are people like Jesus Christ and other great religious leaders and people with humane values, but the ones that historians tend to idolize are Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and so on. Who is called the great in history? Frederick the Great of Prussia who plunged Europe into war again and again and again, or Catherine the Great of Russia, the slow material advance of the bourgeoisie, the men who created American

5:36German liberals, I mean people like us, that is with authentic laissez-faire attitude towards things, anti-imperialist, anti-militarist, who fought against the early anti-Semitic movement for another thing, I used to lecture at the University of Cologne, and German professors had never heard of any of these men, although in their own time they were very well known. There's another example and that's Henri Lepage. I think you know him. He's spoken here at the Mises Institute. Well, he's a very well-educated man. In all of his education he had never been told about Frederic Bastiat.

6:23He had to come to America and became, of course, a copy of the book, The Law. You know what I'm saying? And first time he'd ever heard of Bastiat. Although educated throughout the French... So, in other words, the history of authentic liberalism, of laissez-faire thinkers, has been largely suppressed. I mean, all that they have to talk about is David Ricardo and, God help us, John Stuart Mill, who was the beginning of English liberal decadence. and this whole tradition of liberalism forgotten. And in a way, a priori, we have to assume, and it turns out that it's correct, that throughout the 19th century, there were important liberal thinkers in all Western countries.

7:16I mean, that's how they became, that's one of the ways they became liberalized. Their economies became liberalized and the old mercantilist system was thrown off in one country after another. Germany would be an example, but also the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Spain even to an extent, Italy to an extent, and these people are totally unknown, and it's the status and the movement of gradually accumulating the statism in the late 19th century that is of interest to historians. Here's what I don't understand about the case of Germany. Now, there's been an intellectual effort taken for many decades to try to find the roots of the National Socialist Movement.

8:05And you think then to find the roots of the opponents of what led to National Socialism. So why wouldn't you be naturally, through these studies, be led to the German liberal tradition? Because from the beginning, the history of German, of authentic German liberalism, and you know, I have an article, what was it, in the Review of Austrian Economics, I think, some years back, available on the archives of the Mises Institute, on Eugen Richter, who in his own time was, according to contemporaries, as well known as Bismarck, and he was Bismarck's great opponent, but the history of authentic German liberalism was written either by, or in the history of Germany in general, either by social democrats, or on the other hand by nationalist conservatives.

8:51and both of those groups, even more than they hated each other, hated the authentic liberals and someone like Richter and the others dismissed as dogmatic, doctrinaire. Well, one reason they're held in contempt is that they were the first welfare state, of course, was introduced by Bismarck in Germany in the 1880s and they were the fiercest and truly The Welfare State means welfare not for impoverished people, pauper and so on, but for the working class through health insurance, old age insurance, disability insurance, forced contributions and so on.

9:43and so on. And the reason that they were attacked on the conservative side for their opposition to the welfare state was that they understood what was happening and that is that the Bismarck and the other conservatives and typically other people who support, other right-centered people who supported the welfare state were very worried about the fact that working people now were becoming independent, standing on their own two feet, buying their own insurance and so on. They wanted to reestablish state paternalism over the lower classes, and the welfare state was a way to do it. They were also against German nationalism and militarism, right?

10:28What's that? They were against nationalism. Well, no, I mean, they were German patriots. None of the German liberals really opposed the German unification in 1871, The Unification of the German States under Prussia The British and the English and French and Spaniards even had had a national state for centuries and they figured, you know, why should we Germans not have one? They understood it, though, as a way of creating a defensive situation in Central Europe. When the German states had been divided up, Then France and Russia especially could play their game of using one against Napoleon as the best example, pitting one against the other and in this way encroaching on the different German states, expanding their own territory and their own power.

11:22So the unification of Germany then would create a situation where none of the continental powers could do that to Germany again. but of course then got out of hand and Bismarck was reasonable enough and compromising in diplomacy but the creation of this big strong militarily economically strong Germany was too much of a temptation for the people who came after him and they threw their weight around and scared everybody German Liberalism is one of my interests. I've been interested in the history of liberalism in general, and of course given lectures here on that subject, and in particular in the history of French liberalism.

12:15My doctoral dissertation was on two French thinkers, Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville, and also on Lord Acton. As you know, I did it under Hayek, and those were some of Hayek's absolutely favorite authors, and he got me onto them. And I've written a number of things, given a number of talks in France and elsewhere, on French liberalism, which is very underrated. People think that America and England turned out to be the most liberal societies in the world, true enough, but the fact that France was so early threatened by bureaucratic centralization under the kings, under Napoleon, under all the 19th century governments, created the circumstance, the context, wherein French liberals could critique expanding bureaucratic centralization, Centralization of the use by the state of democracy and democratic majorities to legitimize itself was among the French thinkers, and the French thinkers, it's not an accident that we still use the term laissez-faire, which is a French term, they were the, I don't know how to say it, the French thinkers, the French thinkers, the French thinkers,

13:42The last real liberal school in a school, I'm not saying particular thinkers, of course, are the Austrians, but the last major true liberal school in Europe. And then it came to America, which is another whole interesting episode and aspect of it. I was just talking to Dr. Long about how well libertarianism thrives in the United States today. And I was asking him to speculate on historical reasons for that. What's your opinion on that? Well, you know, it was well and correctly said at one time that the whole libertarian movement could fit into Murray Rothbard's apartment on West 88th Street and often did.

14:38I can look back, not literally, there were people in California, but pretty much. I can look back on that and it's amazing. What do we have here at the Mises University? 125 people. From how many different countries? At least 25, really. Well, it's very remarkable. I just heard an excellent talk by Professor Joseph Salerno on the fall and renaissance of the Austrian School. He concluded that by saying that the essential institutional basis of the continuance of the Austrian School and the flourishing of the Austrian School and elaboration of Austrian theory also has been the Mises Institute and Lew Rockwell's work and we see it, of course, in the Mises University and everything else that happens here.

15:43Yeah, it probably wouldn't have been possible without this infrastructure. And of course not. Murray would still have been a pretty much isolated figure. I mean, he had younger disciples, of course, as we know, and younger followers and a certain amount of influence, but nothing like what's been happening in recent years. Do you find yourself inspired, just a number of people have mentioned how inspiring it is to be around all these young thinkers who are... The Theory of Money and Credit

16:42www.lewrockwell.com

17:12It goes around the world. Some of my talks I think have been distributed and I get letters. I got a letter from somebody in the Netherlands who said that he heard it, happened to hear it on the internet and could I give him more since I talk about the rise of the Dutch Republic as an important stage in European liberalism, give him more details about that and other One of the things that makes me very happy when I think about, and it's not just the Internet, it's also the fact that the Mises Institute has the resources to bring into to print things like the Libertarian Forum, which Murray worked on for years, and then it just died and you figure, well, it wasn't exactly mimeographs, but it was something close to it, the way it originally came out.

18:20How much would you estimate is in the archives of the Mises website, roughly speaking? Is it possible to ... a hundred million words, something like that? Well, easily, because you have whole books, don't you?

19:34The idea of somebody standing in front of students and lecturing to them, and they're thinking about lunch or they're thinking about what happened last night, and so on, it's not going to last forever. These students, if it's not the case now, in a few years, or let's say their children, will have available almost limitless resources. I mean, film, the Library of Congress is going to be on a few disks and so on. And also they can interact with people all around the world in their own, whatever their common interests might be. And I can't imagine that College Education, and anything like the form it has now, as you know.

20:24These are all sort of people dragged into, dragged to be there, that are just there to get their degree for the most part, and very different from the students we have here who come a very long way. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Wow. To think that there are students who, during lunchtime, that are not discussing, well, in Buffalo, they're discussing the Buffalo Bills or the Sabres or something, or, you know, what did she say, what did he say, and so on. This year they discuss the different lectures. They discuss methodology. They discuss public policy and they get very excited about it. Yeah, it's like Murray's living room writ large, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Not as funny though. Well, my other interest besides the history of liberalism has always been revisionist history, as we say.

21:17and my project is to finish my collection of essays on classical liberalism which is like the project has lasted a long time because there's always new stuff coming out and I have not managed to master the art of drawing the line enough is enough so I keep consulting the new works but after that my project would probably be to collect my writings on revisionist history You know, in our great anthology, The Costs of War, I have a couple of essays there on World War I, longish essays on World War I and on Churchill, in Reassessing the Presidency, are these things online, by the way?

22:03I'm doing my best, one essay at a time. The problem is that the files that were used to create those books are not accessible with today's software, so we're having to pretty much reshoot them. A Long Essay on Harry Truman and other revisionist essays.

23:15and the aftermath of the war. And these have to be corrected. If there were no revisionism, we'd still think that the Spaniards had blown up the USS Maine, that the Lusitania just had innocent civilians and no munitions of war, and that Pearl Harbor, the Japanese, for no good reason,

24:42And it's not that we have to totally agree in our conclusions or the structure that we're appealing to, but there's a very great deal to learn. I mean, I would take, for instance, Noam Chomsky, whom you wrote about a number of years ago, did you not? In some magazines. Again, one doesn't agree with Chomsky on a lot of issues, especially on basic social philosophy. and Political Philosophy, but the detailed, the man has such energy, the detailed ongoing critique of American policy and American policymakers is very valuable. What's great about Chomsky, it's just the same thing that's great about Rothbard, is that it has a radicalizing effect on you when you read it, it kind of gets you fired up.

25:32What has also a radicalizing effect are the events of what's actually happening. You know, our good friend Robert Higgs, who has been at the Mises University in the past, has given talks here. You can see he's becoming more radical every week with every new column he comes out with. So you tend to get more radical as you get older? Well, you know, I started pretty radical. Well, I wouldn't say I started radical. Do people actually listening to this because I'm about to make a confession? Well, we can leave the tape running and if it's too shocking... You can edit it out if it's too shocking, yes. Well, I started as a Republican.

26:20Well, we'll try to edit that out, yeah. I really did. But a taft Republican, okay. uh... and then uh... uh... through friends and especially through Murray I became pretty radical pretty early on yeah and uh... uh... Mises too according to Murray got more radicals he got older um... well okay uh... it's possible uh... he was always at his core radical you know in a book that's uh...

27:24of the Central Government of Provinces, Cities, Communities, Neighborhoods, and he says if it were possible down to a particular household. So that is a pretty radical point of view. 1919, yeah. Right, and as Hans Hoppe talks about and other of our friends talk about, I think that's a road to follow. We cannot live with this centralized, a great centralized state. How Much Empirical Evidence Do We Need To See That Government Cannot Be Limited?

28:53The first step is intellectual change. The lies that were fed. You use your critical intelligence. You educate yourself. You read more and more. And, of course, with everything the Mises Institute makes available, that's not very difficult. And then get together with people who you're intellectually compatible with, you agree with, and start change, start actual social change.

29:47Thank you very much, Dr. Reiko.