It should also be emphasised that Mises once said that the problems of Russians and Germans “are not because [they] are barbarians”, and pointed that even they have shown most characteristics of advanced civilization. So this should placate anybody about to suggest that he was an excessive Anglophile or Francophile who detested Germans and Russians.
The simple fact was that the French were advanced, and one had to accept it, whether or not one genuinely loved Russians or Germans over the French.
Which non-Anglo Saxon country would you say was more liberal than France during the age of liberalism? In France, men like Turgot, Say, Constant, and Bastiat were just the peaks of a great wave of liberal thought. In the German-speaking world, men like Humboldt, Goethe, and Menger were liberal anamolies. Even Kant, who is one of the few influential German thinkers one could characterize as liberal, did not understand the harmony of interests, as Mises wrote in Socialism:
The principle of the division of labour revealed the nature of the growth of society. Once the significance of the division of labour had been grasped, social knowledge developed at an extraordinary pace, as we see from a comparison between Kant and those who came after him. The doctrine of the division of labour as put forward by eighteenth-century economists, was far from fully developed when Kant wrote. It had yet to be made precise by the Ricardian Theory of International Trade. But the Doctrine of the Harmony of Interests had already anticipated its far-reaching application to social theory. Kant was untouched by these ideas.
In fact, although many people think of Mises as something of a Kantian, Mises largely blamed Kant for the methodological collectivism that made German social philosophy so barren for so long. He writes:
In economics as well as in general sociology [collectivism] has proved itself utterly barren. It is no accident that the German mind, dominated by the social theories of classical philosophy from Kant to Hegel, for a long time produced nothing important in economics, and that those who have broken the spell, first Thünen and Gossen, then the Austrians Carl Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser, were free from any influence of the collectivist philosophy of the State.
We don’t know why Mises thought Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Lenin were poor thinkers. He did not explain himself. We do know however that he did not like the Russians and was heavily biased against them. In that chapter he writes some pretty outrageous stuff about Russia. Even in the sentence where he mentions Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Lenin he is trying to say not something about them, but something about the Russian people.
Whoever explains what in the hell does “The fortunate circumstance that saved civilization from being destroyed by the Russians was the fact that the nations of Europe were strong enough to be able successfully to stand off the onslaught of the hordes of Russian barbarians.” could possibly reffer to gets a prize from me. I know that barbaric Russia was in 1812 attacked by civilized France, in 1853 by civilized Britain, France and Sardinia, in 1914 by civilized Germany, in 1918 by civilized Britain, France and the USA, but I can not for the life of me think of the example that Mises must be reffering to when he speaks of the successful defense of Europe against the Asiatic hordes, pardon me, against the Russian barbarians. When was it again that Russia launched a war against what Mises would consider “Europe” and how did it end?
That depends on what you call “Russians”, doesn’t it, Marko?
Russia today is a giant land of at least three or four cultures, and that too after the breakup of the tsarist empire and the Soviet union.
By Russians, do we mean Novgorodians, since the days of Alexander Nevskii? Do we mean the Kievan Rus? Which ones? If “Russian” referred to just strictly a single ethnic group with origins centered around Moscow, then we could argue that the Russians already “conquered Europe” and made those areas Russian - specifically Ingermanland and areas that may once have been Polish.
But that is only my speculation. Any opinion I may give is just as worthless as von Mises’, when it comes to Russians, since neither he nor I are Russian or are from a region immediately neighbouring the Russians, and neither he nor I speak Russian and thus sample any of their culture firsthand. A Russian is as unqualified to talk about Germans as a German is to talk about Russians.
PS: Paranoia about Russians amazes me. Back in the days of Crimean War, the British priests did some political propagandizing by claiming that “Russians wish to convert us to their pagan heresy”. Till date, no firsthand account of a Russian leader states a Russian intention to conquer western Europe or convert the world to a particular sect of Christianity. To think that paranoia still exists!
It is doubtful Mises would consider those areas European. People who cast out Russia out of Europe, normally do not stop there but cast out other areas as well.
Well yes, von Metternich famously proclaimed “Asia begins at Landstrasse!” - the royal road leading from Vienna east towards Hungary.
It is an interesting story, but basically seeing Europe as divided into Western Europe (civilized, true Europe) and Eastern Europe (primitive, not really Europe) is an outlook that appeared during the Enlightment to displace the previous outlook that saw Europe as divided into sophisticated and civilized South Europe and the dreary and crude North Europe.
“Tolstoy is the great prophet of a destructionism that goes back to the words of the Gospels. He makes the teachings of Christ, which rested on a belief that the Kingdom of God was imminent, a gospel for all times and all men. Like the communist sects of the Middle Ages and the Reformation he tries to build society on the commands of the Sermon on the Mount. He does not of course go so far as to take literally the exhortation to follow the example of the lilies of the field, which toil not. But in his idea of society there is only room for self-sufficing agriculturists who, with modest means, till a small piece of land, and he is logical enough to demand that everything else shall be destroyed.”
I don’t think Mises wrote elsewhere on Dostoyevsky, but he’s written in so many places on the ideas of Lenin that I am baffled that you can say “he did not explain himself”.
Furthermore, read the sentence:
“People among whom the ideas of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Lenin are a living force cannot produce a lasting social organization.”
It is clear that the above sentence is saying that the prevalence of the ideas of those men is what makes Russia anti-social. It is not the Russian-ness of those three men that make their ideas bad. If the ideas of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Lenin were a living force in France, then that sentence would apply to the French just as much as it did to the Russians.
Wow, he really unloads on Dickens in this chapter in Socialism. Mises places a lot of blame on the “Literati” for creating a fertile environment in the population that would endorse Socialism. If only Russia had a Richard Cobden or a Bastiat to talk some sense into the masses, however if Tolstoy was the true voice of Russia there probably would have not been a WWI. Was there not any decent economists in Russia during this time?
I don’t think so. But that is not to say there were not anti-statists in Russia, however they had other backgrounds than classical liberalism. Heck, Tolstoy himself was as much of an anti-statist as Mises was, and while no doubt had a poor understanding of certain things was better than Mises at the very least on the issue of war and conscription.
I agree. When it comes to pro-freedom views, economists can have very good views on some matters, but can be utterly worthless discussing others. Consider that while an economist might only argue that war is a waste of resources and a misallocation of human capital, while possibly reducing both freedom and security; a philosopher like Machiaevelli argued that a nation-state can always choose when to start a war, but it can never choose when to end it and will not fight it on its own terms; and then a crooked politician like Robert Byrd argued in 2003 that the Iraq War would be a dangerous costly failure, because it may meet short-term objectives but it can never manage the long-term commitments that will be perpetually imposed on the country because of it.
In that sense, there were certain things that only Byrd could figure out, because he had seen how previous wars require armies to be stationed in the country long after the war to stabilize the region and would tear the legislature apart in managing every small decision of taking care of soldiers stuck abroad. And then there were things that only the Florentine philosopher could predict, because he had seen and experienced court life where such decisions were taken. For an economist who merely reads reports of war production boards and sees industrial statistics, he is as limited in assessing the problems of war as the other two are.
No arguments in particular; personally I agree why Mises would gripe on the politics of Tolstoy, still though something amusing from War and Peace:
“Pfuel was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion— science, that is, the supposed knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing, and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German’s self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth— science— which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.”
Funny - that’s the exact thing Mises and Hayek believed. That under the problems of chaos theory and limitations of knowledge, nothing can be fully known, and that known science itself can never be absolute truth, because it reaches a roadblock in understanding human nature.
Their fight against central planning was a part of a broader fight against a drive for a self-styled “rational”, “scientific” utopia.