Ludwig von Mises was called several names and epithets in his life, by his admirers and enemies alike. His friends and colleagues dubbed him the “Last Knight of Liberalism,” while his critics called him intransigent, fanatic, and even less flattering epithets.
Just recently I came across another nickname the great Austrian had in the 1920s and 30s: the sunny pessimist. Writing to Bettina Greaves in 1974, Karl Menger, the son of the famous economist, recounts how this came about:
In the years 1927–36, I often met Mises in homes of common friends. In the second half of that period he mad[e] the most terrible predictions. (Once, I was told, a lady after listening to him for half an hour retired and had to be comforted.) All his gloomy prophesies (later surpassed by reality) were uttered with complete equanimity and a constant smile, which earned him the nickname of the sunny pessimist.
It is easy to understand how Mises could be pessimistic in the 1920s and ‘30s, as Europe was descending rapidly into the hell of socialism. He could explain almost in real time how the policies of the Nazis and the socialists they replaced in power led to the destruction of civilization and the world war. Omnipotent Government from 1944 is perhaps his fullest explanation of the process of the destruction of German civilization, but he saw the same trends in other European countries. Thus, in 1940, in the manuscript that was later published under the title Interventionism: An Economic Analysis, Mises wrote that the Nazis had practically won before they even invaded France; the policies of the western democracies were practically indistinguishable from the National Socialists’, and the French government found it more important to prosecute war profiteers than to ensure adequate provisioning of the French army.
It is more impressive that Mises kept calm and smiling throughout, just like Vera Lynn urged the British soldiers to. Already at the end of the First World War, Mises recounts in his Memoirs (p. 55), he had arrived at the “hopeless pessimism that had long pervaded the best minds of Europe.” Yet his personal philosophy allowed him to escape the apathy such pessimism can lead to. Already as a teenager he had chosen a line from Virgil: tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito (do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it) as his motto. This continued to be his attitude through the darkest days of European history.
Another anecdote recounted by Rudolf J. Klein, one of Mises’s pupils, may substantiate Mises’s prophetic abilities. Writes Klein:
In 1935 he [Mises] came back to Vienna from Geneva for a short visit. I saw him at his old office at the Chamber of Commerce and asked what he thought would be the final outcome of the Hitler regime. He replied (in 1935!), “When one wing of the German army will be at Vladivostock and the other at Gibraltar, the whole thing will break down!”
Aside from the geographic inaccuracies—as is well known, the Germans never invaded Spain and they were stopped at Moscow and Stalingrad, not Vladivostok—Mises’s foresight is eerie. Others, it is true, predicted German aggression throughout the thirties, but those predictions seem based on little more than Teutophobia. Mises, on the contrary, loved German culture, was well read in the German classics and German philosophy, and it pained him deeply to see the destruction of German and European civilization. Yet he understood the inevitable outcome of socialism and autarky: the breakdown of the international division of labor and war.
Mises’s social philosophy is just as relevant today as ninety years ago for understanding the chaos around us. Ideas rule the world, and the real factor supporting the ruling elite is always the dominant ideologies. Just like Mises had to battle the Marxist and non-Marxist socialists who took power across Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century (and in most places hold on to it to this day), so today we are faced with cultural Marxists and progressive mobs. Since there is no way to defeat them in the long run except by exposing their erroneous and antisocial doctrines, and since the “progressive” barbarians may well remain in control for the foreseeable future (and cause untold damage to the economic and spiritual civilization of the West—or what’s left of it), it’s well to keep before us Mises’ personal example. There are reasons enough to be pessimistic, but let us at least be sunny pessimists.
Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito.
