ECONLOG POST

Mar 15 2025

F.A. Hayek, James Buchanan, Nancy MacLean, new history of capitalism, Quinn Slobodian

Ludwig von Mises and the Berlin Batman

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Ludwig von Mises and the Berlin Batman
Categories: Austrian Economics Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings Economic History Economics and Culture

By Art Carden, Mar 15 2025

A body of literature called the New History of Capitalism argues (incorrectly, I believe) that Western prosperity is built on legacies of exploitation like colonialism and slavery. Economists are very skeptical because the New Historians of Capitalism rest much of their case on fundamental misunderstandings of basic economic concepts like national income accounting. Economists have criticized some of the movement’s foundational texts in the blogosphere and scholarly journals.

There is a related body of work I’ve called the New Intellectual History of Capitalism, focusing on post World War II neoliberalism and the alleged conspiracy beginning with Mont Pelerin Society’s first meeting in April 1947. Examples of this genre include Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, which stirred public choice circles in 2017 by attempting to link James M. Buchanan to Virginia segregationism in the 1950s and which Michael Munger called “speculative historical fiction.” Other contributions include work by Quinn Slobodian purporting to locate fascist sympathies in the judiciously selected and carefully minced words of Ludwig von Mises.

MacLean’s treatment of Buchanan is conspicuous, like Naomi Klein’s treatment of Milton Friedman in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which I reviewed here. Other incorrect interpretations come from Quinn Slobodian’s treatments of Ludwig von Mises in multiple places and his treatment of W.H. Hutt in his book Globalists. Sandy Darity, M’Balou Camara, and MacLean pick up on Slobodian’s portrayal of Hutt and misrepresent an argument Phil Magness, Ilia Murtazashvili, and I make (Magness and I respond here; the published version of their paper is here, along with Murtazashvili, we respond here).

Consider the insinuation that Mises and F.A. Hayek were fascist sympathizers. Mises did write, hyperbolically, that lovers of liberty should thank the fascists for vanquishing the communists, but this was not because he thought the fascists were good but because he thought the communists were worse. It’s like the Battle of Stalingrad in Enemy at the Gates. There are no good guys, just bad guys (the Soviets) and worse guys (the Nazis). Being glad the Soviets helped defeat Hitler is hardly an endorsement of communism.

Mises’s opposition to totalitarian socialism of the right (Naziism) and totalitarian socialism of the left (communism) was so complete that he ended up being the subject of a 1998 issue of The Batman Chronicles titled “The Berlin Batman.” It features a short story asking, “What if Bruce Wayne had actually been a Jewish artist named ‘Baruch Wane’ in 1930s Berlin?” When Baruch Wane heard that the Nazi Kommisar had to meet a train because they had seized the books and library of Ludwig von Mises, he worked to stop them (perhaps he delayed them and did not stop them). Still, it correctly explained that Mises was anti-Nazi and correctly portrayed Mises’s Human Action as a volume that repudiated totalitarian doctrines and embraced liberty.

Is a comic book portrayal definitive evidence? No, but it is suggestive: if Misesian anti-Nazi liberalism is so obvious that it became the subject of a Batman comic, perhaps there isn’t much to read between the lines.

 

[Editor’s note: Readers may also be interested in this Liberty Matters forum led by Phil Magness, Why We Don’t Need a “New” History of Capitalism.)

Art Carden is Professor of Economics & Medical Properties Trust Fellow at Samford University.

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READER COMMENTS

Monte
Mar 15 2025 at 4:16pm

Anyone who has read Mises or Hayek and concludes they’re closet fascists is either being intellectually dishonest or suffers from a serious case of implicit bias.  I liken Slobodian’s textual misrepresentation of the two to that part in the movie, Jaws, where the ME attributes a young girl’s death to a boating accident.

 

Mactoul
Mar 16 2025 at 4:05am

Howsoever the classical liberals try to separate themselves from the conservatives, for the Left they are right-wing authoritarians.

Here Elon Musk is called authoritarian nationalist but New York Times calls him radical libertarian.

Monte
Mar 16 2025 at 11:22am

You could simply describe EM is an enigma, but that would be a gross oversimplification.  According to Psychometrica, his MBTI type is commonly believed to be INTJ.  But his biographer, Walter Isaacson, has suggested that he has multiple distinct personalities that manifest themselves in different situations.  We simply don’t understand him.

It’s been said that what we don’t understand, we fear.  What we fear, we judge as evil. What we judge as evil, we attempt to control.  And what we cannot control, we attack. Now that Musk has conjoined himself with Trump and Vance, we have what their detractors are calling an abomination.  A 3-headed monster, or Cerebus, if you will.

Mactoul
Mar 17 2025 at 12:29am

It is not the question of Musk’s psychology but the Left’s psychology. They invariably put classical liberals among the conservatives, the right-wing authoritarians, the fascists and other sundry deplorables, however fervently the classical liberals deny their membership of this club and however fervently the classical liberals denounce their co-members of the right.

Hayek and Buchanan explained that they weren’t conservatives but they still get so labelled.

Monte
Mar 17 2025 at 2:27am

Quite.  I characterized Musk et al from the perspective of a modern liberal, whose madness has been aptly described as “a massive transference neurosis acted out in the world’s political arenas.”

pat peterson
Mar 16 2025 at 12:44pm

Exactly!   GREAT scene from Jaws.

Richard W Fulmer
Mar 15 2025 at 6:41pm

Marx conveniently left mercantilism off his hierarchy of societal progression so that he could conflate it and its abuses – including slavery and colonialism – with capitalism. Adam Smith spent most of his book, “The Wealth of Nations,” criticizing the mercantile system, and Marx was well aware of that; he quoted Smith extensively in his own writings.

Smith condemned slavery on both moral and economic grounds, arguing that slave laborers tend to be less productive and less innovative than free workers. He also criticized conquest and colonization, noting that taking and holding foreign territory is typically more costly and less profitable than is voluntary trade.

Mactoul
Mar 16 2025 at 4:02am

 taking and holding foreign territory is typically more costly and less profitable than is voluntary trade.

For whom? For the government?

But this is ignoring incentives of various individuals involved

Also, were it better ( but for whom?) if the English had refrained from colonizing North America and were just content trading with the natives?

Perhaps the experience of American war of Independence soured Adam Smith.

Richard W Fulmer
Mar 16 2025 at 12:53pm

Mercantilism, like feudalism before it, aimed to increase national wealth and military power by accumulating gold and silver. It sought to achieve this by establishing colonies, extracting resources, and monopolizing colonial trade to maintain a “favorable” balance of trade. Instead, mercantilism often drained the treasuries of colonizing nations.
That’s not to say individuals didn’t benefit. Many colonists improved their lives by leaving their home countries, and some speculators amassed considerable wealth through colonial investments.
But Smith’s focus was on identifying the sources of national, not individual, wealth and on discrediting economic systems that didn’t add to the general welfare.

Felix
Mar 16 2025 at 9:47pm

How can adding guards and military occupation reduce costs?  The booty still has to be dug up, grown, produced, transported, etc, and their productivity is surely going to decrease when occupied instead of increased by the lure of profits.

Mactoul
Mar 17 2025 at 12:33am

All the people who could conquer did so. There must be something in it for somebody even if the calculators find costs exceeding gains.

Daniel Kuehn
Mar 16 2025 at 11:16am

Art you are not presenting Quinn’s work accurately here. He describes Mises on fascism as “the logic of the second best,” which appears to be exactly your position. I don’t know anywhere where he says that Mises was a Nazi sympathizer. The first third of the book is about how Mises and several others escaped the Nazis and set up shop in Geneva, the UK, and the United States. What Quinn does point out – and I think he’s correct on – is that Mises clearly articulated on multiple occasions his approval of the use of both police and paramilitary violence against left and democratic parties and the use of fascism as an “emergency makeshift.”

I think you also are not accurately representing who Mises was targeting. Yes, he does target the Communists in many places but his letter about the July Revolt named the Social Democratic Party as the enemy that police and paramilitary power had to fight.

Of course Mises was anti-Nazi but that doesn’t necessarily put him in a good position of vis-a-vis far-right violence.

What do you think of Andrew Farrant and Vlad Tarko’s work on Hayek? Are they also part of this “New Intellectual History of Capitalism”? Or do we just pretend that certain authors have noticed these things?

Hutt poses a whole different set of problems.

I don’t mind the disagreement, what frustrates me most is the impossibility of talking seriously about these figures – who we all take seriously – when any work on them that isn’t totally flattering gets treated like a conspiracy theory.

Felix
Mar 16 2025 at 9:49pm

Second best out of two is also known as last place.

Daniel Kuehn
Mar 16 2025 at 10:36pm

That’s… that’s not what it means here.

Quinn was saying that Mises did not prefer fascism but in a constrained environment embraced it as a second best option (in this case over the Social Democratic Party!). It’s a qualified endorsement but that doesn’t mean at all that it’s his last choice.

Phil Magness
Mar 18 2025 at 2:12am

Slobodian has a long and documented history of misrepresenting Mises’s words, up to and including editing quotations, to make him look sympathetic to racism and Nazism.

MacLean, Darity, et al similarly have a long and documented history of misrepresenting Hutt’s words, up to and including editing quotations, to make him look sympathetic to apartheid and racism.

Kuehn has  a long and documented history of misrepresenting several free market economists’ words, up to and including editing quotations, to make them look sympathetic to various forms of racism.

Pointing out the prevalence of this tactic among pseudo-historians on the left is not flattery or aggrandizement. It is fidelity to the evidentiary record.

Jon Murphy
Mar 16 2025 at 11:44am

Mises’s opposition to totalitarian socialism of the right (Naziism) and totalitarian socialism of the left (communism) was so complete that he ended up being the subject of a 1998 issue of The Batman Chronicles titled “The Berlin Batman.”

Well that’s neat. I didn’t know LvM featured so prominently in a Batman comic

steve
Mar 16 2025 at 11:46am

Here is his actual quote. I think you reasonably believe that fascists and would be dictators  did not have the best intentions. In my estimation he went way overboard in praising them. Really, when did would be dictators actually really have good intentions? So I would interpret this as his having been mildly supportive early on but once they revealed their, entirely predictable, bad behaviors he vigorously opposed them. It doesnt seem that different to me than the people who praised Russia and communism when it opposed fascism.

“It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.”

Steve

Daniel Kuehn
Mar 16 2025 at 12:08pm

Steve I sort of agree except that his criticism of fascism in the same text shows he knew exactly what it was from the beginning. He was not naive early on and learned better later. I think it’s better to say that he saw it as a legitimate emergency power. This was a common view among German and Austrian conservatives. The other reason to think he knowingly embraced it as an emergency power but rejected it as a possibility permanent arrangement is that this is precisely the formula we see through Hayek and Pinochet. They’re pretty explicit about emergency dictatorship vs permanent dictatorship. Why not take that at face value?

steve
Mar 16 2025 at 5:17pm

First, I think you should take his own words at face value rather than try to explain them. Second, his praise is high, his condemnation is kind of weak. Third, he actually worked for, IIRC, one of those dictators. Last, out shouldn’t be that hard to admit that he was wrong should it? Lots of people are wrong about stuff. Wife says I ma wrong all the time.

Steve

Daniel Kuehn
Mar 16 2025 at 5:59pm

Right that’s all fine by me! I read you as saying he didn’t know any better then learned he was wrong. I actually think that’s a little too generous because he clearly understood the problems with fascism when he was praising it. But yes, I think we get views like Art’s here when we don’t let them speak for themselves.

Janet Bufton
Mar 18 2025 at 9:31am

The cover of an issue of The Batman Chronicles, Winter 98. The background is dark blue-green, Batman is clutching his cape in each hand and smiling, facing the reader straight on. The text of the title is in white. It cost CAD4.25

The comic is fine, but it is not as though Mises’ resistance is a subplot that comes through because it was so widely accepted that it could be thought of as evidence. It’s the whole argument of the comic (and imo the story suffers for it).

It’s a fun bit of libertarian paraphernalia but I’m not sure we should look here for evidence of more than libertarians’ fondness for Mises.

Comments are closed.

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