The Truth About Mises and Fascism
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.
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 p
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