Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School

Just a few words by way of introduction to this collection of varied essays. The title of this book and of its first essay is a misnomer, sadly advisable in order to avoid superficial confusion. That is, there was no “classical” liberalism, only a single liberalism, based on private property and the free market that developed organically, from first to last.

Nowadays, to this doctrine there is contrasted something called “modern” liberalism, which is in fact indistinguishable from democratic socialism.

I believe I give good reasons to hold this to be an ideologically inspired fraud, a fraud instantiated in the elevation to the pantheon of liberalism of writers like John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes. I have a good deal to say about these writers here.

The reader will note that I am occasionally rather critical of F.A. Hayek. Surprisingly so, perhaps, since Hayek was my major professor in graduate school at the University of Chicago and the head of my doctoral dissertation committee. I trust that this will mislead no one. I have always had the highest respect for Hayek, one of the great practitioners of Austrian economics and a superb scholar. My sharp disagreements with him concern, first, his admitted penchant for the welfare state, and, second, what I perceive to be his overestimation of the liberal tradition in Britain and his disparagement of the French tradition. If this diverse collection of essays has a major theme it is that it was not Britain but France that gave us the best liberal thinkers, for over a century, from Benjamin Constant to Gustave de Molinari.

I have also included a piece on one of my heroes, the German liberal leader, Eugen Richter. I have a large soft spot for the freedom fighters who stood steadfast—“like Leonidas’ Spartans at Thermopylae”—against the current of their times, like Ludwig von Mises himself.

My grandparents sailed to the United States from southern Italy and Sicily, in hope and eventually with some small degree of success. I am grateful to them and to the America they came to for what it once was. The last essay shows my deep regret at the quasi-fascist state that confronts us now.