John Maynard Keynes was a terrible economist, but he understood politics and ideology quite well. He understood how political ideas gain influence and are communicated to the public. This was partly why he cultivated alliances with universities and sought to use scholars as a means of influencing government policy. Keynes understood that ideology and ideas generally filter down from academic institutions into the general public by way of mass media, school teachers, and political elites. Keynes knew that no one is immune from this process of transmitting ideas. For instance, he was not wrong, for the most part, when he stated: “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
The snide tone is typical Keynes, and his intent was likely to disparage the laissez-faire economists he hated. But the sentiment was correct: a key theater of the battle of ideas is fought in the institutions and publications that we can loosely call “academia.”
Even before the Catholic Church created the university system in the High Middle Ages, the formation of ideology followed a similar pattern. The debates occurred within the social class we might call “men of letters”—private historians, social critics, and philosophers of various types—whose views influenced the “practical men” of the political and commercial spheres.
In recent centuries, as capital accumulation in the West has allowed for the creation and maintenance of key institutions and publications dedicated to scholarship, the “men of letters” have expanded beyond those who were independently wealthy and could pursue scholarship on their own dime. Since then, academic institutions and academic journals—funded in part by both middle-class and wealthy patrons—have provided a home and a foundation for scholarship and for the many schools of thought that have formed around competing ideas and world views.
It is through this milieu that we witness much of the “battle of ideas” that deeply influences the public debate over government policy.
Indeed, the ideology of laissez-faire—now known as classical liberalism or libertarianism—has been certainly influenced through these same mechanisms of academics sustained by academic journals and active research. One example of this process in the history of free-market thinking is described by historian Ralph Raico in his book The Struggle for Liberty. Raico notes that Adam Smith’s influence in Britain grew through an important network of laissez-faire journal writers and university professors. These persons, in turn, were essential to communicating key ideas. Raico writes:
An example ... of the power of ideas, is a man who wrote the first biography of Adam Smith, [Smith’s] own student Dugald Stewart. ... For twenty-five years, Stewart taught at the University of Edinburgh. Among his students were Francis Jeffrey, the first editor of the Edinburgh Review. The Edinburgh Review was the great review of Whig classical liberal thought in the first half of the nineteenth century in England. Thomas Babington Macaulay, for instance, wrote almost all of his essays for the Edinburgh Review. Also among Stewart’s students were Henry Brougham, the famous Whig member of Parliament; Henry Reeve, who was the first translator of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; Sydney Smith was a great Anglican clergyman, liberal politician, and liberal polemicist and favored Catholic emancipation and other liberal reforms.
Smith may have been wrong about several key aspects of economic theory, but, as Raico notes, Smith’s social policy—opposition to high taxation and mercantilism—was highly influential and “for the good.” Jean-Baptiste Say, for instance, drew heavily upon Smith in promoting low taxation and laissez-faire into French liberal thought. (Say greatly improved upon Smith in the field of economics.) The Stewart circle in Edinburgh was important in this process.
Clearly, the laissez-faire ideals promoted by Stewart did not uniformly produce hard-core laissez-faire thinking among all who encountered the Edinburgh Review or Stewart’s university classes. But it is difficult to deny that without the influence and publications of those scholars out of Edinburgh, free-market liberalism would have been far less influential, and perhaps the radical anti-imperialists and anti-protectionists of the nineteenth century—such as Richard Cobden—would have never obtained the successes they did.
Similarly, in France, radical laissez-faire thinking was sustained and developed through rigorous journals such as the Journal des économistes and Le Censeur européen. As Raico puts it, “A group of then-young liberals founded a journal, which happened to be called Le censeur européen and began publishing their views. Their views were a synthesis of some somewhat earlier French thinkers, like [Benjamin] Constant, Destutt de Tracy, and Jean-Baptiste Say.” By transmitting the thinking of Say who was, at times, a borderline anarchist, this journal would prove essential in expanding the radical anti-state liberalism that would be key in the thinking of Frederic Bastiat and the anarcho-capitalist Gustave de Molinari. Decades later, Molinari himself became the editor of the Journal des économistes for nearly thirty years and through his work helped to sustain resistance against the socialists and central planners of all types working to undo all the gains of the laissez-faire liberals during the nineteenth century.
Theorists like Molinari, Bastiat, Stewart, and Say were not mere political commentators in the style of a Fox News talking head. Rather, they were serious, rigorous scholars who took their academic work seriously and engaged both academic and non-academic audiences. This sort of work, when done properly, is necessary precisely because it lasts longer than the breadth of a news cycle or a political administration. The idea is to confront a long-term debate over long-term problems, and avoid the delusion—adopted by most of the easily-manipulated and semi-literate general population—that politicians can solve problems with a new war or “social program.”
It is this type of serious work that endures—unlike the rantings of a Rachel Maddow or Ted Cruz, which are forgotten and irrelevant almost immediately—and thus can be influential even decades later. This is why Bastiat and the work of the French liberals would still greatly influence Murray Rothbard and the radical libertarians of the twentieth century. It’s why the work of old Italian elite theorists like Vilfredo Pareto—himself a student of Molinari 110 years ago—are still being discussed.
The tide of laissez-faire was receding by the late nineteenth century, but through their faculty positions and through their journals, the free-market liberals fought on against the powers of statism and imperialism that were marching through Europe at that time. Although they were never able to gain sustained control over the ruling political coalitions of Europe’s states, the influence of the laissez-faire liberals was nonetheless key in softening the blow of statism.
To paraphrase Lew Rockwell: who knows what sort of socialist totalitarian hell might have prevailed throughout all of western Europe had it not been for the courageous radicals influenced by the Journal des économistes?
In the twentieth-first century, the debate is not over, and advocates of laissez-faire must today fight similar fights against the old enemies, the state and its oligarchs. Moreover, many of the same tools there have always been key in the battle of ideas remain important today. It is still necessary to provide publications and academic journals through which the ideas of a free society can be developed, sustained, and sharpened. It is still necessary to provide a means of economic support for scholars doing this invaluable work. Donors and patrons often provided this necessary foundation in the nineteenth century. They are still needed today.
This is why Lew Rockwell founded the Mises Institute. The institute provides its own academic institutions and publications designed to provide a home to the modern-day radicals in the tradition of Molinari, Mises, and Rothbard. The tools include the fellowships, the seminars, the journals, and even physical lecture halls that transmit to a new generation the ideas of peace and freedom developed by other centers of hardcore laissez-faire thinking throughout the West. The Mises Institute fills this role today and provides an alternative from the corrupted academic departments of mainline academia, long taken over by Marxists and social democrats.
Just as the Smithians had the Edinburgh Review and Bastiat’s disciples had the Journal des économistes, we have the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. We have mises.org, where hundreds of new articles and podcasts are published each year, all drawing upon the foundations of timelss scholars like Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Menger, and others. These publications are where today’s Rothbardians and Misesians find a place where academic rigor demands the sort of quality research that is necessary to sustain any ideological movement beyond the short term and beyond a few news cycles in the media.
Although he reveled in engaging laymen as a public intellectual, Rothbard always understood the importance of rigor in scholarship. This is why Rothbard worked to develop academic journals and worked to put in motion key programs for teaching and scholarship such as Mises University and our Summer Fellows program.
This was all why Rothbard put himself so enthusiastically into his work as the first academic vice president at the Mises Institute. The academics was never an afterthought for Rothbard or for Rockwell. This aspect of Rothbard’s work is noted by Rockwell:
After Joey Rothbard’s death, I flew to New York to organize the disposal of Murray and Joey’s goods according to their wills. Books and papers went to the Mises Institute, of course, where they are the center of our library and archives. But my strongest memory, aside from ineffable sadness, was the printed document on the small table next to Murray’s reading chair in the living room. It was Joe Salerno’s doctoral dissertation. ... How appropriate that [Salerno] is also Murray’s successor as our academic vice president.
In other words, since Rothbard’s passing, the academic standard has not changed. This is why Rothbard’s successor at the Mises Institute is Salerno, an academic economist like Rothbard who now oversees two academic journals and a number of academic programs for faculty, students, and scholars. As with the classical liberals of Britain, or the radicals of France, the rigorous academic foundations for the battle of ideas remains essential to the preservation of the idea of freedom. The Mises Institute, with its retinue of dozens of Fellows, contributors, and teachers, works to maintain the legacy of those who came before.
As Keynes suggested, the “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence” simply fail to understand the importance of maintaining an intellectual and academic home for the ideas of peace, freedom, and sound economics. These ideas are not kept alive by mere thoughts and prayers but by the work of those who labor to teach ideas to a new generation and to develop and sustain ideas through rigorous debate and research. Over the centuries, many institutions have played their role in this good work. The Mises Institute does this today.
