The American Right Is Abandoning Mises

THE AUSTRIAN ECONOMIST’S PRINCIPLED THOUGHT ONCE SERVED AS A CHECK ON THE INTELLECTUAL RIGHT.

- BRIAN DOHERTY

LUDWIG VON MISES, a foundational figure of modern libertarianism, was also for decades a hero of the American right. In George H. Nash’s magisterial 1976 history The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, the very first chapter stars the Austrian economist and his students and associates, saying that “it would be difficult to exaggerate the contributions of... Ludwig von Mises to the intellectual rehabilitation of individualism in America.”

Mises’ disciple Murray Rothbard complained that conservatives’ adoption of Mises occluded the more radical portions of the economist’s thinking: elements that were antistate, propeace, pro-immigration, even critical of the Christian tradition. In a 1981 essay in The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Rothbard griped that too many of Mises’ right-wing fans “have unwittingly distorted [his views] and made them seem at one with the modern conservative movement in the United States,” as though Mises were “a sort of National Review intellectual.”

Figures around National Review did admire Mises. In his introduction to National Review founder William F. Buckley’s first blockbuster book—1951’s God and Man at Yale, an attack on what Buckley saw as a leftist thrust to Ivy League education— the conservative journalist John Chamberlain named Mises as one of the social thinkers shamefully excluded from the typical Yale curriculum.