Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
By Ludwig Mises
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) first published
Socialism in German, in 1922. The edition presented here is that published by Liberty Fund in 1981. It follows the text, with correction and enlargement of footnotes, of the Jonathan Cape, Ltd., edition published in London in 1969. The edition was based on the 1951 edition by Yale University Press which slightly enlarged the first English edition published by Jonathan Cape in 1936, translated from the German by J. Kahane. Only a few corrections of obvious typos were made for this website edition. One character substitution has been made: the ordinary character “C” has been substituted for the “checked C” in the name Cuhel.
Translator/Editor
J. Kahane, trans.
First Pub. Date
1922
Publisher
Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc.
Pub. Date
1981
Comments
First published in German. Foreword by Friedrich A. Hayek not available online
Copyright
The text of this edition is under copyright. Picture of Ludwig von Mises: file photo, Liberty Fund, Inc.
- Publisher
- Foreword
- Preface
- Translator
- Preface2
- Introduction
- Part I,Ch.1
- Part I,Ch.2
- Part I,Ch.3
- Part I,Ch.4
- Part II,Ch.5
- Part II,Ch.6
- Part II,Ch.7
- Part II,Ch.8
- Part II,Ch.9
- Part II,Ch.10
- Part II,Ch.11
- Part II,Ch.12
- Part II,Ch.13
- Part II,Ch.14
- Part II,Ch.15
- Part II,Ch.16
- Part III,Ch.17
- Part III,Ch.18
- Part III,Ch.19
- Part III,Ch.20
- Part III,Ch.21
- Part III,Ch.22
- Part III,Ch.23
- Part III,Ch.24
- Part III,Ch.25
- Part III,Ch.26
- Part IV,Ch.27
- Part IV,Ch.28
- Part IV,Ch.29
- Part IV,Ch.30
- Part IV,Ch.31
- Part IV,Ch.32
- Part V,Ch.33
- Part V,Ch.34
- Part V,Ch.35
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Epilogue
- Bio
1 The Ascetic Point of View
Socialism as an Emanation of Asceticism
CHAPTER 28
Withdrawal from the world and denial of life are, even from the religious point of view, not ultimate ends, pursued for their own sakes, but means to the attainment of certain transcendental ends. But though they appear in the believer’s universe as means, they must be regarded as ultimate ends by an inquiry which cannot go beyond the limits of this life. In what follows, we shall mean by asceticism only that which is inspired by a philosophy of life or by religious motives. With these restrictions, asceticism is the subject of our study. We must not confuse it with that kind of asceticism which is only a means to certain earthly ends. If he is convinced of the poisonous effects of liquor, a man abstains from it either to protect his health generally or to steel his strength for a special effort. He is no ascetic in the sense defined above.
Nowhere has the idea of withdrawal from the world and denial of life been manifested more logically and completely than in the Indian religion of Jainism, which is able to look back on a history of 2500 years. “Homelessness,” said Max Weber, “is the fundamental idea of salvation in Jainism. It means the breaking off of all earthly relations, and therefore, above all, indifference to general impressions and avoidance of all worldly motives, the ceasing to act, to hope, to desire. A man who has only the capacity left to feel and think ‘I am I’ is homeless in this sense. He wishes neither life nor death—because in either case it would mean desire, and that might wake Karma. He neither has friends nor raises objections to the actions of others towards him (for example, to the usual washing of feet which the pious person performs for the saint). He behaves according to the principle that one should not resist evil and that the individual’s state of grace during life must be tested by his capacity to bear trouble and pain.”
*11 Jainism prohibits most strictly any killing of living beings. Orthodox Jains burn no light during the dark months because it would burn the moths, make no fire because it would kill insects, strain the water before boiling it, wear a mouth and nose veil to prevent themselves from inhaling insects. It is the highest piety to let oneself be tortured by insects without driving them away.
*12
Only a section of society can realize the ideal of ascetic living, for the ascetic cannot be a worker. The body that is exhausted by penitential exercises and castigations can do nothing but lie in passive contemplation and let things come to it or consume the rest of its strength in ecstatic trances and thus hasten the end. The ascetic who embarks on work and economic activity to earn for himself only the smallest quantity of the necessities of life abandons his principles. The history of monasticism, not only of Christian monasticism, reveals this. From being abodes of asceticism the monasteries sometimes became the seat of a refined enjoyment of life.
The non-working ascetic can only exist if asceticism is not obligatory for all. Since he cannot nourish himself without the labour of others, labourers must exist on whom he may live.
*13 He needs tributary laymen. His sexual abstinence requires laymen who will bear successors. If this necessary complement is lacking, the race of ascetics quickly dies out. As a general rule of conduct asceticism would mean the end of the human race. The holocaust of his own life is the end towards which the individual ascetic strives, and though this principle may not include abstinence from all actions necessary to maintain life with the object of putting a premature end to it, it implies, by suppression of the sexual desire, the destruction of society. The ascetic ideal is the ideal of voluntary death. That no society can be built on the ascetic principle is too obvious to need closer explanation. For it is a destroyer of society and life.
This fact can be overlooked only because the ascetic ideal is seldom thought out, and still more seldom carried out, to its logical conclusion. The ascetic in the forest who lives like the animals on roots and herbs is the only one who lives and acts according to his principles. This strictly logical behaviour is rare; there are, after all, not many people who are prepared to renounce light-heartedly the fruits of culture, however much they may despise them in thought and abuse them in words, few who are willing to return without more ado to the way of life of the deer and the stag. St. Aegidius, one of St. Francis’s most zealous companions, found fault with the ants because they were too much preoccupied with collecting supplies; he approved only of the birds, because they do not store food in barns. For the birds in the air, the animals on earth, the fish in the sea, are satisfied when they have sufficient nourishment. He himself believed that he lived according to the same ideal when he fed himself with the labour of his hands and the collection of alms. When he went gleaning with the rest of the poor at harvest-time, and people wanted to add to his gleanings, he would refuse saying: “I have no barn for storing. I do not wish for one.” Yet this saint did derive advantages from the economic order he condemned. His life in poverty, possibly only in and by this economic order, was infinitely better off than that of the fishes and birds he believed he was imitating. He received income for his labour out of the stores of an ordered economy. If others had not gathered in barns the saint would have gone hungry. Only if everybody else had taken the fish as their example, could he have known what it was to live like a fish. Critically disposed contemporaries recognized this. The English Benedictine, Matthew Paris, reports that Pope Innocent III advised St. Francis, after listening to his rule, to go to the swine, whom he resembled more than men, to roll with them in the mud, and to teach his rule to them.
*14
Ascetic morals can never have universal application as binding principles of life. The ascetic who acts logically passes voluntarily out of the world. Asceticism which seeks to maintain itself on earth does not carry its principles to the logical end; it stops at a certain point. It is immaterial by what sophistry it tries to explain this; it is sufficient that it does so and must do so. Moreover, it is compelled at least to tolerate non-ascetics. By thus developing a double morality, one for saints, one for worldlings, it splits ethics in two. The only truly moral folk are the monks, or whatever else they may be called, who strive for perfection by asceticism. By splitting morality in this way asceticism renounces its claim to rule life. The only demand that it still ventures to make upon laymen is for small donations to keep the saint’s body and soul together.
As a strict ideal, asceticism knows no satisfaction of wants at all. It is therefore non-economic in the most literal sense. The watered-down ideal of asceticism, conceived by the laymen of a society that reveres the asceticism of the perfect, or by monks living in a self-sufficient community, may demand only the most primitive hand to mouth production, but it by no means opposes the extreme rationalization of economic activity. On the contrary, it demands this. For, since all preoccupation with worldly matters keeps people away from the only purely moral way of life and is to be tolerated at all only as a means to an intermediate—unfortunately unavoidable—purpose, then it is essential that this unholy activity should be as economical as possible, so as to reduce it to a minimum. Rationalization, desirable to the worldling in his efforts to reduce painful and increase pleasant sensations, is imposed upon the ascetic, to whom the painful sensations aroused by work and privation are valuable castigations, because it is his duty to devote himself to the transitory no longer than is absolutely necessary.
From the ascetic point of view too, therefore, socialistic production cannot be preferred to the capitalistic unless it is held to be more rational. Asceticism may recommend its devotees to limit the activities by which they satisfy their wants because it abhors a too comfortable existence. But within the limits which it leaves for the satisfaction of these wants, it cannot regard as right anything but what rational economy demands.
2 Asceticism and Socialism
Socialist thought at first cold-shouldered all principles of asceticism. It harshly rejected any consoling promise of a life after death and aimed at an earthly paradise for everybody. Neither the world to come nor any other religious inducements have any interest for it. Socialism’s one aim was to guarantee that everyone should reach the highest standard of well-being attainable. Not self-denial, but enjoyment was its criterion. Socialist leaders have always definitely opposed all those who show themselves indifferent to the increase in productivity. They have pointed out that, to lessen the hardships of labour and increase the pleasures of enjoyment, the productivity of human labour must be multiplied. The grandiose gestures of degenerate scions of wealthy families in praise of the charms of poverty and the simple life made no appeal to them.
But on looking into this more closely, we may detect a gradual change in their attitude. In proportion as the uneconomic nature of socialistic production becomes apparent, socialists are beginning to transform their views on the desirability of a more abundant satisfaction of human wants. Many of them are even beginning to show some sympathy with writers who praise the Middle Ages and look with contempt on the riches which Capitalism adds to the means of existence.
*15
The assertion that we could be happy, or even happier, with fewer goods can no more be refuted than it can itself be proved. Of course, most people imagine that they have not enough material goods; and, because they value the increase of well-being that greater exertions on their part can bring more than they value the leisure which they would gain by renouncing it, they exhaust themselves by laborious work. But even if we admit the assertions of those semi-ascetics whose outlook we have been discussing, this by no means commits us to giving the socialist method of production precedence over the capitalist. For supposing too many goods are produced under Capitalism, the matter could be remedied quite simply by reducing the quantity of work to be done. The demand that we should reduce the productivity of labour by adopting a less fruitful way of production cannot be justified by such arguments.
Praktische Wirtschaftspolitik (Berlin, 1919), p. 53.
Geschichte der Ethik als philosophischer Wissenschaft, Vol. II, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 1921), p. 450.
La cité moderne, pp. 413 ff.
Die englische Ethik der Gegenwart, trans. Peusner (Leipzig, 1914), p. 20.
Deontology or the Science of Morality, ed. Bowring (London, 1834), Vol. I, pp. 8 ff.
Utilitarianism (London, 1863), pp. 5 ff.; Jodl,
Geschichte der Ethik als philosophischer Wissenschaft, Vol. II, p. 36.
Sittlichkeit ohne “Pflicht,” pp. 272 ff.
Humanitaires et libertaires au point de vue sociologique et moral, pp. 157 ff.
Kapital und Kapitalzins, 3rd ed., Part II (Innsbruck, 1909), pp. 233 ff. Publisher’s Note: This is pp. 135 ff. in Volume II of the English edition.
Deontology, Vol. I, p. 87 ff.
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen, 1920), Vol. II, p. 206.
op. cit., Vol. I, p. 262.
Die franziskanische Bewegung (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1903), pp. 53 ff., 59.
Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 38, Vol. l, pp. 312 ff. Specially remarkable in this context are also the remarks of Charles Gide, “Le Matérialisme et l’ Économie Politique” in
Le Matérialisme actuel (Paris, 1924).
Das Mönchtum, 7th ed. (Giessen, 19o7), p. 32 ff.
Das Mönchtum, p. 33.
Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II (Tübingen, 1913), pp. 386 ff.
Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig, 1907), pp. 50 ff.
Aus Wissenschaft und Leben, Vol. II (Giessen, 1911), pp. 257 ff.; Troeltsch,
Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, pp. 31 ff.
Das Urchristentum, Vol. I, pp. 649 ff.
Studien in der romanisch-kanonistischen Wirtschafts-und Rechtslehre his gegen Ende des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1874-83), Vol. I, p. 2.
De usuris (III, 19). See Schaub,
Der Kampf gegen den Zinswucher, ungerechten Preis und unlautern Handel im Mittelalter (Freiburg, 1905), pp. 61 ff.
Geld und Kredit, Part II (Berlin, 1876), pp. 333-5 note.
Cod. iur. can., has come to acknowledge conditionally the legality of the taking of interest, see Zehentbauer,
Das Zinsproblem nach Moral und Recht (Vienna, 1920), pp. 138 ff.
Lehrbuch der Nationalökonomie, pp. 212 ff.
op. cit., p. 212.
Das Urchristentum, Vol. I, p. 652, explains Jesus’ pessimistic judgment of earthly possessions by the apocalyptic expectation of the near world catastrophe. “Instead of trying to reinterpret and adapt His rigoristic expressions on this subject in the sense of our modern social ethics, one should make oneself familiar, once and for all, with the idea that Jesus did not appear as a rational moralist but as an enthusiastic prophet of the impending Kingdom of God and has only thus become the source of the religion of salvation. He who wants to make the eschatological enthusiasm of the prophet the direct and permanent authority for social ethics does just as wisely as he who would wish to warm his hearth and cook his soup with the flames of a volcano.” On May 25th, 1525, Luther wrote to the Danzig Council: “The Gospel is a spiritual law by which one cannot well govern.” See Neumann,
Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland (Halle, 2865), p. 618. Also Traub,
Ethik und Kapitalismus, 2nd ed. (Heilbronn, 2909), p. 71.
Die wirtschaftsethischen Lehren der Kirchenväter (Vienna, 3907), pp. 84 ff.
Patrologiae Graecae, Vol. LX, pp. 96 ff.