Mises as Radical: Retrospective on Rothbard's Thesis

0:00In 1981, Rothbard wrote an article called The Laissez-faire Radical, Quest for the Historical Mises, in which he took issue with the prevailing interpretation of Mises as a conservative. He said, look, this guy is a radical, he was against nationalism, against war, he believed in secession down to the village level and principle down to the level of individual, he believed in open borders, he analyzed society in terms of class conflict, He was a rationalist critic of religion, he was an admirer of the French Revolution, so in all these respects he seems radical rather than conservative. Ten years later, Jeff Tucker and Lew Rockwell wrote an article called The Cultural Thought of Ludwig von Mises, in which, while not disagreeing with anything Rothbard had said, made the case for the respects in which Mises could be regarded as conservative.

0:50That he was a traditionalist about family and gender and marriage, that he praised Western civilization as superior to all others, he was a critic of mass culture and so on. So I just want to talk a little bit about respects in which Mises can be viewed as radical, respects in which Mises is apparently not a radical, what can we make of this? Well first it depends exactly what we mean by radical. There are, it seems to me, at least three different ways the word is used. And one of the ways is going to turn out really to be two ways in itself, so it's really three and a half or four. In one sense, when we say it's radical, we simply mean extreme, extreme of anything. So if something is really extreme or thorough going, goes sort of all the way consistently in some direction, then we call it radical.

1:41So there's radical as opposed to moderate, radical as opposed to wishy-washy. There's another sense, we may call it a political or an ideological sense, where being radical is opposed to being politically and or culturally conservative. And you can see these two senses aren't going to be quite the same. Someone who is really extremely conservative would count as a radical in the sense of being extremely in some direction, but they wouldn't count as radical in the sense of being extremely opposed to conservatism. Then there's a third sense which is also connected to but distinct from the others and others, where radical means someone who seizes things by the root, that's the original root meaning of radical, and someone who thinks that you have to analyze social phenomena in terms of their connection to a whole totality, that they don't believe in merely local fixes, you think you, in order to change one thing, you have to change a lot of different things, And so therefore, someone who's radical in that sense,

2:49there's a sense that someone like Chris Guevara has spent a lot of time talking about connections between radicalism and libertarianism, in that sense of radical. You can see it's connected to the other two, but not identical with them. Well, so let's take the simplest sense. Radical just meaning advocating an extreme version of whatever it is you advocate. So if what Mises advocates is a priorism in methodology and free markets in economics and politics, then it seems safe to say that he counts as radical in both senses. His version of methodological a priorism is extreme in the sense that it's very thorough going. He never claimed to have originated this a priori method.

3:34He thought it was implicitly the method of most previous good economists, But he certainly, it's much more explicit, much more consistent. Likewise, in free markets, he wasn't the only guy around who was talking about free markets, but compare him with other people like Milton Friedman, other free market advocates, he's clearly much more thorough going in his advocacy of free markets. People who are usually thought of in the mainstream as extreme free marketers, like the German Ordo Liberals, who Mises called interventionists, or the Mont Pelerin people that Mises called a bunch of socialists. You can see that in that sense he is extreme. Again, this is extreme in a value-neutral sense. Sometimes people use extreme as though it's a bad thing.

4:22Obviously it seems to me it depends what it is that you've got an extreme amount of, whether that's a good or a bad thing. And being extremely free market is not something I regard as a bad thing. On the other hand, you could say that Mises was not as radical a free marketer as some of the people. One of the things that Guido Hulsman's biography brings up quite nicely is how bemusing it was for Mises to go from Europe to the United States and find that he had gone from usually being the most extreme free market person in the room in Europe to suddenly clashing with people like Rothbard and Roosevelt or Lane and R.C. Hoyles who all thought that he was much too moderate in his pursuit of free markets and this must have been a rather of a surprise for him.

5:08So, he wasn't sort of the, so just in terms of being a radical in the sense of advocating an extreme version of whatever it is you advocate, you know, he was pretty radical but obviously not as radical as some of these wild-eyed obstreperous Americans. What about radical in the sense of being opposed to conservative? Well, of course, that depends, you know, first of all, exactly what counts as conservative and second, exactly what counts as, you know, being opposed to conservative or being farther away from conservative. Rothbard, back in his left and right days, argued there was a mistake to think of state socialism as the polar opposite of free market libertarianism.

5:55He thought that that actually, I'm sorry, of the polar opposite of conservatism, he thought that that historically it was free market libertarianism and positions like that that were the polar opposite and socialism was a middle-of-the-road movement. What he meant by that was that socialism accepted the same goals as libertarianism and liberalism, or many of the same goals, more freedom and more prosperity for ordinary people and so on. But did this by use of conservative means, by conservative means, the old traditional conservative upholding traditional aristocratic hierarchies and so forth. and so forth. He said that he thought that the real opposite of conservatism was libertarians and also he included as well the new leftists. Suppose the old leftists are sort of the Marxian authoritarians, he thought were sort of more in the middle. The new leftists, although he had various criticisms of them and departures from them, thought that they were much more or in the direction of being extremely away.

7:03So to that extent, if the farther you move toward free market libertarianism, the farther away you are from conservatism, and if being a radical in the political or ideological sense means being farther away from conservatism, then insofar as Mises was extremely free market, then Mises was also not only radical in the extreme sense, but also radical in the political sense but then of course he fell short of people like Rothbard in that sense and being favorable to conscription in principle at least in his later writings and his principle of sort of secession down to at least the village level was to some extent in tension with Mises idea that it was the job of the central government to impose more liberal policies What about cultural conservatism? If being more radical means being more opposed to conservatism, does that just mean politically or does it mean culturally too?

8:16Well, that's a debate that I don't need to get into too much here, except to notice that traditionally libertarians, you know, if we go to the 19th century, libertarians tended to be very much opposed to cultural conservatism. You might say that being opposed to cultural conservatism is really the ultra-paleo-libertarian position. It's true that Mises has had culturally conservative views to some extent on things like marriage and relations of the sexes, but it's a little more complicated than that because, you know, if you look at what he says about marriage, on the one hand, he's very critical of feminism and critical of the free love movement, and both of them he associates with socialism.

9:05Although if you actually look at the history of libertarianism, libertarians are very much involved both in early feminism and the early free love movement, and by free love they didn't mean promiscuity, they just meant removing coercion from the sphere of sexual relations. But what exactly is his view on marriage? Well, here's something he says about marriage. Marriage is an adjustment of the individual to the social order. Exceptional natures whose abilities lift them far above the average cannot support the coercion with such an adjustment to the way of life of the masses must involve. The man of genius cannot, in the long run, feel himself bound by marriage without violating his own self. Genius does not allow itself to be hindered by any consideration for the comfort of its fellows, even of those closest to it.

9:51The ties of marriage become intolerable bonds, which the genius tries to cast off. I know this is something he said before he was married. Well, now it's true that this doctrine is not a feminist doctrine because what he says is well this is marriage inevitably cramps the style of the male genius but the woman has no choice because her biological nature leads to her subordinate creativity to reproduction and therefore the woman has no choice but to marry but a man at least a man of genius you know would never want to marry well so it's not a feminist view but it's not exactly a cultural concern to say, you know, the truly independent man would have nothing to do with marriage and would break the ties of it if he possibly could.

10:36It's not standard cultural conservatism anyway.

10:44Also some questions ask about whether there's a tension between his views about women's necessary preference for reproduction over creativity, the expression of biology, whether that sits well with his view that we don't know anything about the biological basis of human preferences and that we shouldn't try to base theymology on physical and empirical psychology. But anyway, in that sense, Mises' attitudes are in some respects culturally conservative and in some respects the opposite. It's a kind of a mix. What about some of the other aspects of the social goals of the left, or at least of the new left, the The Left that Rothbard thought was at least partially salvageable.

11:29Mises did not share Rothbard's even partial enthusiasm for the New Left. Guido quotes in his biography a letter from Mises talking about Rothbard's alliance with the New Left saying, It's sad to see a brilliant mind go to pot that way. If you think about some of the issues the New Left stressed, and some issues Mises seems to be sympathetic and others not. For example, the New Left was very, like the old, was sympathetic with the struggles of industrial workers against employers and with peasants against landowners. Now, Mises didn't have much sympathy with the struggles of industrial workers against employers. He, in fact, refers to the workers as dull beneficiaries of the capitalistic system who indulge in the delusion that it is their own performance of routine jobs that create all these marvels.

12:23and all these marvels. He says, well really, it's not the workers, the workers are just sort of droning away and it's really the employers who employ all the entrepreneurial skill. I'm not sure how he knew it was only the employers who were involved in that. But anyway, he was not sympathetic to the left on that. But when it comes to peasants, he's a bit more sympathetic. He has this view that the existence of peasant societies where you have vast holdings of of Land owned by a few small landowners and all these people working a service on it. He thought that that was very unlikely to arise from pure market forces. He thought that that sort of thing almost always arose from government intervention on behalf of the landowning class and therefore he held that if you opened it up to free markets, those vast land holdings would quickly get eaten away.

13:17He also thought that the peasants who were working on those lands were by and large the descendants of the people from whom the lands had been taken in the first place. Now his attitude to this is a bit different from Rothbard's. Rothbard's view was that the land, you know, when we can establish that these peasants really are the descendants of the original people from whom the land was expropriated, then the land should be returned to the peasants. Mises didn't think that, partly I think because Mises doesn't have this natural rights view of property, but Mises did think that in fact just letting free markets operate would tend to get rid of this land-owning class. Moreover, part of his objection to immigration controls was he thought that this was a way in which vast areas of uncultivated land were being kept out of cultivation and that people, you know, so in a sense he was anticipating some of Walter's views on it's being wrong for people to bar off some area of un-homesteaded land and prevent it from being homesteaded. Although Mises' reasons for that weren't rights-based, they were sort of

14:29utility-based. Also when he talks about colonialism he sounds as new lefty as anybody. He says the basic idea of colonial policy was to take advantage of the military superiority of the white race over the members of other races, the Europeans set out equipped with all the weapons and contrivances that their civilization placed at their disposal to subjugate weaker peoples to rob them of their property and to enslave them. On issues such as whether his antithesis Mises had antipathy to many aspects of popular culture, makes him anti-lefty, it's hard to evaluate since the left has had such a love-hate relationship with popular culture itself. It's true that he did say that no culture outside of the West has ever really expressed the idea of liberty.

15:18But then he hadn't read my article on Confucianism. I don't know why he missed that article. There's a sense in which Mises can be seen as sharing the New Left's concern with participatory democracy, although it's not a sense that the New Left would be likely to recognize or embrace. But the sense is, one of the main things that will sort of lefty proponents of democracy say is merely being able to go into a voting booth and yank a lever every four years isn't democracy. and democracy means maximizing your say over the decisions that affect you. Well, Mises often again referred to the free market as an economic democracy. I think partly he was using the phrase economic democracy tongue-in-cheek because that was the leftist phrase, but there's a sense in which he was pointing to the same point that under the price system, it's consumer decisions of what to buy that determine exactly how capital ends up getting used.

16:19And so there's a sense, and it's not by majority vote, it's not as though if the majority of people want to buy Britney Spears CDs and the minority want to buy Scarlatti CDs that everyone has to get Britney Spears CDs rather under the market those who vote for Britney Spears CDs get those and those who vote for Scarlatti CDs get those and those who want both get both and those who want neither get neither. So there's a sense in which in this ideological sense of being opposed to cultural conservatism Although he's certainly more culturally conservative than he is conservative politically, he's not quite as culturally conservative as he might seem. What about this dialectical sense, as we might call it, of radicalism being about not viewing things in isolation but viewing things as part of an overall interconnected system, therefore thinking that change involves changing the whole system?

17:13Well, he talks that way too. He talks about the place of the entrepreneur in the economy or the place of prices in the economy is not isolated phenomena but part of the whole system. He also talks about getting rid of war by changing the fundamental view about the causes of war, by trying to show that in fact there isn't a fundamental disharmony of interests. Now one thing where I think he may depart somewhat from this dialectical view is when he talks about something called solidarism, Which is the view that while free markets are necessary for a flourishing society, they're not sufficient and they need to be supplemented by other provisions. He talks about two versions of solidarism. What do you call solidarism? This is in his book, Socialism.

18:00One version is where the additional provisions are governmental interventions and obviously those sorts are not going to be something he would advocate. But he also talks about cases where merely through moral suasion, through trying to appeal to people's consciences, You try to get them to do things, you try and get them to behave in ways that you regard as moral without basing that in addition to simply following their economic self-interest. And he calls that a version of socialism. And that I find rather puzzling. It's acting as though you can treat economic self-interest as somehow apart from all these other considerations of moral behavior. I don't know why he wouldn't just say, if part of the owner's preference is to act in accordance with these moral principles and moral advice, well then there's nothing contrary to the free market about it.

18:51But he also held that in working for a free market, you have to address broader mistakes. He writes a whole book about the anti-capitalist mentality, which he attacks what he regards as various ideological and moral views that seem to influence this. So, I would say that if you consider these three dimensions of radicalism, he scores pretty high on all of them, higher on some than on others, but I think that in the end it makes sense to view Mises as radical. Those of us who regard ourselves as radical in all three senses can take Mises as an inspiration.