by Lew Rockwell, Lew Rockwell:
You would think it is impossible to call Ludwig von Mises a fascist. He was of course an old fashioned classical liberal, what we would call today a libertarian. Some extreme leftists have even ben stupid enough to claim that Mises was sympathetic to the Nazis. They don’t deny that Mises was a refugee from Nazism, but they say, when it comes down to it, Mises would take fascism, even Nazism, over a Marxist socialist revolution.
Of course, this is nonsensical. Mises wrote the classical analysis of Nazism, identifying it as a form of socialism in which the ostensible forms of the market, such as private ownership and private business, were preserved, but in fact Nazi officials told the businessmen what prices to charge. They were totally subject to the will of the state.
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Despite all this, some historians have answered our question in the affirmative, and foremost among them is Perry Anderson, a formidable Marxist scholar. In an essay ”The Intransigent right and the Sources of Fascism,” which appeared in the London Review of Books in September 1992 and has been often referenced since then, Anderson says of Mises that “there was no more uncompromising champion of classical liberalism in the German-speaking world of the Twenties … [but] looking across the border, he could see the virtues of Mussolini. The blackshirts had for the moment saved European civilization for the principle of private property; ‘the merit that Fascism has thereby won will live on eternally in history.’”
Anderson accurately quotes from Mises’s Liberalism but nevertheless utterly distorts Mises’s view. Mises offers in that book a penetrating criticism of Italian fascism, and only by extracting the quoted sentence from its context, and distorting its meaning, has Anderson been able to portray Mises as a supporter of Mussolini. In what follows, I will try to explain Mises’s view of fascism, as he expounds this in Liberalism. In doing so, I will follow the great libertarian historian and student of Mises Ralph Raico, who addressed the topic in an essay of characteristic brilliance, “Mises on Fascism, Democracy, and Other Questions.”
Mises’s discussion is contained in “The Argument of Fascism,” a section in the first chapter of Liberalism, “The Foundations of Liberal Policy.” Mises maintains that the coming to power of the “parties of the Third International”—i.e., the Communist parties controlled by Soviet Russia—has changed the nature of European politics for the worse, in a way that even World War I did not. Before the Communists came to power, the influence of liberal ideas imposed patterns of restraint on authoritarian forces.
Before 1914, even the most dogged and bitter enemies of liberalism had to resign themselves to allowing many liberal principles to pass unchallenged. Even in Russia, where only a few feeble rays of liberalism had penetrated, the supporters of the Czarist despotism, in persecuting their opponents, still had to take into consideration the liberal opinions of Europe; and during the World War, the war parties in the belligerent nations, with all their zeal, still had to practice a certain moderation in their struggle against internal opposition. (All subsequent quotations are from Liberalism)
Things changed when the Communists came to power.
The parties of the Third International consider any means as permissible if it seems to give promise of helping them in their struggle to achieve their ends. Whoever does not unconditionally acknowledge all their teachings as the only correct ones and stand by them through thick and thin has, in their opinion, incurred the penalty of death; and they do not hesitate to exterminate him and his whole family, infants included, whenever and wherever it is physically possible.
We now come to a part of Mises’s argument that is crucial to understanding his opinion of fascism. He says that some opponents of revolutionary socialism thought they had made a mistake. If only they had been willing to kill their revolutionary opponents, disregarding the restraints of the rule of law, they would have succeeded in preventing a Bolshevik takeover. Mises clearly associates the Fascists with these “nationalists and militarists” and says they were mistaken. Revolutionary socialism is an idea, and only the better idea of classical liberalism can defeat it.
