Mises reframed racial hierarchy as an aptitude for market cooperation

Evidence

In appropriating this tradition, Mises portrayed civilisation as inextricably economic and racial. While he rejected the biological racism of the French eugenicist Arthur de Gobineau, Mises sought to rescue its ‘germ’ for a ‘modern’ race theory that ascribed racial hierarchies to an evolutionary process that gave certain races ‘so long a lead that members of other races could not overtake them within a limited time’. … For Mises, what distinguished races was not only an inequality of intelligence and willpower, but also an unequal ability to form societies based on an extensive division of labour. The ‘better races’, he argued, have a special aptitude for social cooperation through the market. Consequently, the ‘peoples who have developed the system of the market economy and cling to it are in every respect superior to all other peoples’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 112

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s study of how human-rights and market discourse mask hierarchy — parallels the project’s broader argument that liberal market ethics encode racialized civilizational assumptions.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this economic-racial framing later get inherited or repudiated by Hayek, Friedman, and neoliberal human-rights advocates the book tracks?