The Last Knight of Liberalism

Chapter 2: School Years

1 Carl E. Schorkse, Fin-de-siècle Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 6.

2 Roman classicism for the lower chamber, the Abgeordnetenhaus, Greek classicism for the upper chamber, the Herrenhaus.

3 Until the 1890s, Vienna counted barely more than 60,000 inhabitants. Felix Somary recalls: “Everything outside the centre was known as ‘Vorstadt’—the suburbs—which almost meant the same as ‘provinces’.” Felix Somary, The Raven of Zurich: The Memoirs of Felix Somary (London: Hurst & Co., 1960), p. 1. After 1900 a municipal reform merged Vienna with its proximate suburbs. The old Vienna thereafter became the first district of the new city.

4 By comparison, it takes more than two hours of walking to cross Paris within the Boulevard Périphérique, and it takes roughly the same time to walk through the city of London.

5 William M. Johnston, Vienna, Vienna—The Golden Age, 1815–1914 (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1981), p. 104. Johnston observes that even simple members of the opera or Philharmonic orchestras were greeted in public and that “many of them performed chamber music in the salons of the wealthy.”

6 Schorkse, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, p. xxvii.

7 On Vienna café culture, see Gustav Gugitz, Das Wiener Kaffeehaus. Ein Stück Kultur- und Lokalgeschichte (Vienna: Deutscher Verlag für Jugend und Volk, 1940). On the role of cafés in the education of young intellectuals see Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern—Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Frankfurt a.M.: Gustav Fischer, 1988), pp. 56f.

8 Mises, Erinnerungen (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1978), p. 4; Notes and Recollections (Spring Mills, Penn.: Libertarian Press, 1978), p. 2.

9 Mises, Erinnerungen, p. 4; Notes and Recollections, p. 2.

10 Johnston, Vienna, Vienna, p. 20:

The concentration of the supreme genius of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert in one city over two generations has no parallel in the entire history of culture. The closest parallel would be the Rome of Raphael and Michelangelo, or the Athens of Sophocles and Euripides. Yet in no other art do the greatest geniuses so outstrip lesser creators as in musical composition.

11 Ibid., p. 104.

12 William Johnston observes that the majority of great “Viennese” pioneers had been born outside of Vienna. See ibid., p. 198.

13 Heinrich Graetz reports that the first cautious steps toward Jewish integration into Viennese social life were undertaken when Fanny Itzig, a Jewish woman from Berlin (that is, from the Mendelssohn circle) moved to Vienna in the 1780s and opened a brilliant salon. See Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1895), vol. 5, pp. 413f.

14 See Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (London: Pluto Press, 1994).

15 Johnston, Vienna, Vienna, p. 200.

16 Ibid., p. 98:

[T]he paper took an increasingly pro-German and anti-Slav stand. Under its mentor and editor Moritz Benedikt (1849–1920), it fanned anti-Slav feelings among Austro-Germans. It lauded the post-1880 alliance with Germany, and in 1914 positively welcomed war as an ally of Wilhelm II.... The Neue Freie Presse resembled the liberal bourgeoisie who read it: exquisite taste in culture accompanied by naivete in politics.

17 See her recollections, Adele von Mises, “A Day in the House of My Parents,” Tante Adele erzählt (unpublished manuscript, 1929). Graetz mentions one “great rabbi Landau” as condemning the study of philosophy and science. See Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 5, p. 402.

18 What Schorske says about Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, also applies to Ludwig von Mises:

When Theodor was born in 1860, his family was well out of the ghetto: economically established, religiously “enlightened,” politically liberal, and culturally German. Their Judaism amounted to little more than what Theodor Gomperz, the assimilated Jewish classicist, liked to call “un pieux souvenir de famille.” (Schorkse, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, p. 147)

Schorske’s parents even liked to call his bar mitzvah his “Konfirmation.”

19 Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern, p. 17. Zweig was born in the same year as Mises, 1881, and also was a Jewish intellectual whose family had settled in Vienna only recently. Zweig’s testimony is therefore representative of experiences and sentiments of the milieu in which Mises spent his childhood.

20 Johnston, Vienna, Vienna, p. 17. Newspaper censorship continued in force until after 1900 (see ibid., p. 97).

21 The expression is Stefan Zweig’s.

22 Why had Franz’s police state tamed the Viennese more than the provincials? Johnston gives this explanation:

Vienna suffered far more harshly from censorship and police surveillance than any other region of the Habsburg Empire. In the days before the electric telegraph and the railroad, it was nearly impossible to harass a hinterland as effectively as a capital city.... At no other time since Maria Theresa centralised Austrian administration did the provinces compete so successfully with the capital in cultural prominence as during the Biedermeier period. (Johnston, Vienna, Vienna, pp. 17f.)

23 Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, The Cultural Background of Ludwig von Mises (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999), p. 3.

24 Ibid.

25 Detailed information on the classes taught at Mises’s school is contained in Jahres-Bericht über das k.k. Akademkische Gymnasium in Wien für das Schuljahr 1899/1900 (Vienna: Verlag des k.k. Akademkischen Gymnasiums, 1900) and the annual reports for the previous years.

26 Virgil, The Aeneid, VI, 95.

27 Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1956), pp. 93–94. Mises argued:

The liberty which the Greek statesmen, philosophers and historians glorified as the most precious good of man was a privilege reserved to a minority. In denying it to metics and slaves they virtually advocated the despotic rule of a hereditary caste of oligarchs. Yet it would be a grave error to dismiss their hymns to liberty as mendacious. They were no less sincere in their praise and quest of freedom than were, two thousand years later, the slave-holders among the signers of the American Declaration of Independence. (p. 93)

And he went on:

The passionate endeavors to eliminate the classical studies from the curriculum of the liberal education and thus virtually to destroy its very character were one of the major manifestations of the revival of the servile ideology. (p. 94)

For a diametrically opposed assessment of the relationship between classical literature and liberty see Frédéric Bastiat, “Baccalauréat et socialisme,” Oeuvres completes (2nd ed., Paris: Guillaumin, 1863), vol. 4, pp. 442–503. Bastiat argues in particular that the classics have bequeathed to us the notion that society is a purely conventional construct, as well as the idea that legislation could fabricate society according to just any design.

28 Johnston, Vienna, Vienna, p. 97. The other reformers were the professors Franz Bexner and Hermann Bonitz.

29 Königlich preussische Akademie der gemeinnützigen Wissenschaften.

30 Eugen Guglia, Das Theresianum in Wien (Vienna: Schroll, 1912). Somary, The Raven of Zürich.

31 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, p. 135; Karl Kautsky, Erinnerungen und Erörterungen (The Hague: Mouton, 1960), p. 211.

32 Rudolf Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht (Berlin: Ullstein, 1932), pp. 15f.

33 Johnston, Vienna, Vienna, p. 217.

34 See Margit von Mises, My Years with Ludwig von Mises (Cedar Falls, Iowa: Center for Futures Education), p. 15.

35 See Mises, Erinnerungen, p. 3. There he states: “As an Austrian it was not difficult for me to realize the overtones of these writers. And I soon discerned the method of their analysis, which had rudely been called the falsification of history.” Mises, Notes and Recollections, p. 3. See also Margit von Mises, My Years with Ludwig von Mises, p. 15.

36 Lew Rockwell, “Heart of a Fighter,” The Free Market 23, no. 7 (2005): 4f.

37 See Rudolf A. Métall, Hans Kelsen (Vienna: Verlag Franz Deuticke, 1968), p. 4.

38 Many years later, he had nothing favorable to say about the neo-Kant-ian movement (in particular Cohen and Natorp), which blossomed at the turn of the century. He said it was an era of decline and neo-Kantianism was its philosophical reflection. See Mises to Lachmann, letter dated October 11, 1956; Grove City Archive: Lachmann file.

39Jahres-Bericht über das k.k. Akademische Gymnasium in Wien für das Schuljahr 1899/1900, p. 13. The written part of the exam also included mathematics and geometry (requiring among other things that he deliver a mathematical proof for a geometric theorem), as well as translations. Mises had to translate from Latin into German, from German into Latin, and from Greek into German.

40 Mises, Theory and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 293–94.

41 Mises, “Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and the Discriminating Reader,” The Freeman (August 1959).

42 Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, pp. 377ff.

43 The Austrian Reichsrat voted a new constitution on December 21, 1867. On the Ausgleich see, in particular, ibid., pp. 111ff.

44 This concerned in particular Slovaks and Romanians. The “Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia” was also part of Hungary, but it was relatively autonomous.

45 They were pressing these demands on their legal representative, the King of Hungary. This king was of course Franz Joseph himself.

46 Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, p. 113.

47 Support for the Ausgleich came from the Poles and the Italians. Both nations were settled predominantly in areas where they had the economic and political power, but were numerically inferior to other local nations (Ruthenians, southern Slavs).

48 This was one of the stipulations of an agreement of seven governments at a congress in Berlin in August 1878. The Berlin Congress dealt with territorial questions in southeastern Europe and the Middle East. It was prompted by a crushing Russian victory over Turkey and signed by these two states, as well as by the governments of Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, England, and Italy.

49 Johnston, Vienna, Vienna, p. 8.

50 The greatest problem of this stance was that the traditional political territories (the “kingdoms and lands”) did not have nationally homogeneous populations. Except for some of the Alpine regions, all these traditional territories hosted at least two nationalities, often more.

51 Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, p. 391.

52 Somary, The Raven of Zurich, p. 11. He goes on to observe:

The leaders of our modern great empires are driven rapidly in bullet-proof cars, protected by countless bodyguards. Aristotle thus defined the difference between a monarch and a tyrant: the monarch protects his people, the tyrant has to protect himself from them.

53 Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, p. 210.

54 Somary, The Raven of Zurich, p. 10.

55 These figures are taken from Johnston, Vienna, Vienna, pp. 199f.

56 Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, p. 311.

57 Georg Franz has argued that the rising Austro-Jewish establishment was instrumental in promoting a homegrown brand of classical-liberal doctrine. See Franz, Liberalismus—Die deutschliberale Bewegung in der habsburgischen Monarchie (Munich: Callwey, 1955), pp. 145–220, 439.

58 Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, p. 348.

59 On Adler see Karl R. Stadler, “Victor Adler,” Tausend Jahre Österreich, Walter Pollack, ed. (Vienna: Verlag Jugend und Volk, 1974), vol. 3, pp. 50ff. Kautsky distinguished himself by advocating a determinist brand of Marxism, that is, he believed that Marx had discovered strict laws of social evolution. Capitalism necessarily led to socialism and communism, and it was therefore devoid of sense to try to “push” things through violent overhaul. Norbert Leser argued that Kautsky thereby exercised a nefarious influence on Austrian socialism. Kautsky’s determinist views spread fatalism and paralyzed the activities of socialist “practitioners.” See Norbert Leser, “Otto Bauer— Friedrich Adler—Max Adler,” in ibid., p. 256.

60 Sieghart, Die letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht, p. 351. (German pronunciation of the letter “k” renders the epithet identical to international slang for excrement.)

61 Somary, The Raven of Zurich, p. 7.

62 Rechts- und staatswissenschaftliche Fakultät der k.k. University of Vienna.

63 According to his 1941 U.S. “Affidavit of Identity and Nationality,” see Grove City Archive: Mexico 1942 files.