Mises privately welcomed fascism as a temporary bulwark against Bolshevism and European decline

Evidence

In March 1938, the Gestapo ransacked the apartment of the leading Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises, confiscating twenty-one boxes of papers and sealing the apartment behind them. Two years later, Mises, who had initially left Vienna for Rappard’s Institute for International Affairs, fled Europe altogether for the United States. He wrote to Hayek that he was reluctantly saying ‘adieu to a Europe about to disappear forever’. A decade earlier, Mises had been cautiously optimistic that fascist movements had saved Europe from the crisis of Bolshevism. ‘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’, he wrote – adding that the ‘merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history’. Although he warned that fascism was no more than an ‘emergency makeshift’, he stressed that it emerged not among ‘barbarians’, as had Bolshevism, but in Europe, where ‘the intellectual and moral heritage of some thousands of years of civilization cannot be destroyed at one blow’. Fascist movements would therefore always remain under the influence of liberalism, he predicted and, once the indignation at Bolshevik ‘murders and atrocities’ had passed, fascism would become more ‘moderate’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 105

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the intellectual prehistory of the Mont Pèlerin Society and the neoliberal genealogy — comparable to the libertarian-right’s historical accommodation, even welcome, of authoritarian regimes that Whyte will develop further. — connects to: Mises favored retaining European military presence to preserve imperial market integration — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 249; Mises saw European fascism as a temporary savior of liberal civilization against Bolshevism. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 105
• SEED: Angle: the founding fathers of free-market economics were not principled opponents of authoritarianism but cautious admirers of fascism as order-restoring — a provocation that complicates the standard ‘neoliberalism vs. totalitarianism’ origin story.

Broader Connections

• Mises favored retaining European military presence to preserve imperial market integration #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 249