Mises never gave up the term liberalism: “The question could rather be raised whether, in the interest of facilitating the diffusion of liberal ideas, one ought not to give the ideology of liberalism a new name, so that the general prejudice fostered against it, especially in Germany, should not stand in its way. Such a suggestion would be well-intentioned, but completely antithetic to the spirit of liberalism. Just as liberalism must, from inner necessity, eschew every trick of propaganda and all the underhanded means of winning general acceptance favored by other movements, so it must also avoid abandoning its old name simply because it is unpopular.” FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/4851/on-the-term-liberalism/
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Mises never gave up on the term “liberalism”. However he didn’t live in a media saturated society as we do today either. The term is used so relentlessy and so wrongly by everyone nowadays that “reclaiming” its original meaning is prolly a lost cause and almost certainly a waste of time.
Well while we’re at it, I always resented the words “socialisim” and “communisim”. There is nothing “sociable” about coercing people into economic slavery and it’s not a “community” when it’s done at gun-point. And how about “social security” which is neither sociable nor secure. Or “medicare” – guess what, no one really shows “care” when it’s an entitlement and not a charity. And I also hate all those names like “department of education”, well excuse me, they do not educate anybody, “department of agriculture”, well excuse me they do not grow anything. They are such liars. They can’t even be honest about what they call themselves.
To further the diatribe, I intensly dislike the word, “Capitalism.” A word that means everthing – means nothing. It is a contrivance of Marx to disparage economic models other than his own. ALL economic systems are capitalistic – regardless of WHO provides the capital. The Americanist economic model is simply the natural result of free people interacting freely (for the most part, although that happy condition is deteriorating daily.)
The way Mises meant it, liberalism included support for democracy. Since the welfare state is a consequence of democracy, it can be argued that modern liberalism (social democracy) is a consequence of Mises’ liberalism.
Mises’s idea of democracy included the right to exit–essentially he meant that people should be permitted to choose the political arrangements under which they live. You can say he was naive but it is not an unreasonable position.
Ever since first reading Hayek and Mises, I have been very sympathetic to attempts to reclaim the term Liberal. I do not contend that by reclaiming that label that Liberalism would then be triumphant. But I do think that reclaiming that label would be a symptom of the re-emergence of Liberal thought into public opinion.
At the risk of sounding almost like a troll, I’ve often felt that terms like “anarcho-capitalism” appeal only to those who are already there or close to it.
“Anarchist” is not much clearer or didactic for general consumption.
“Mises’s idea of democracy included the right exit–essentially he meant that people should be permitted to choose the political arrangements under which they live. You can say he was naive but it is not an unreasonable position.” This implies that liberal democracy would create the world order that many people call anarcho-capitalism. So why scare people away with words like anarchy and capitalism?
What we want is freedom and law. That is liberalism. Anarcho-capitalism is just liberalism pushed to its final conclusion, the free society. There’s no need to use scare words.
The confusion regarding the meaning of the word liberalism for me reveled a lot about the nature of our society. It actually contributed to my becoming an Austrian. When I learned that the word liberalism had turned into a completely opposite meaning, it helped me to see that the state is forever trying to obscure and confound all ideas and symbols of individual freedom. Why? A confused, scared, and ignorant society is much easier to control i.e. enslave. Truth = free. Anything but the truth = slavery. We can not let people forget where the root of this word comes. Liberal comes from the Latin liber meaning “free.”
Jesus said “…you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32
“Libertarianism” also ought to be done away with. It is used often interchangeably with “classical liberalism”, which just shows that it is an attempt to evade the real meaning of liberalism. To declare oneself a libertarian is to alienate oneself from all the great liberal minds and thinkers that came before and proudly declared themselves to be liberals, and of the immense progress made possible by liberal policies of the past. This is our heritage. If we hope to succeed, we must not renounce it.
That is why I will never be a libertarian.
Where exactly did Mises say that democracy included the right to leave the process? How did he elaborate on this? I’m very curious to find out more.
Here is a selection of quotations
You know, you can’t just tell people what words mean or ought to mean. The definitions of words are determined by the interplay of individuals using them for communication, very much the same way that prices are determined in a market. It’s natural for the meaning of a word to change over time, too. This is what makes us libertarians rather than, in most contexts, liberals: the fact that we are trying to use English to communicate with other people.
That said, I’m somewhat interested in trying to reclaim “liberal” now that it is no longer self-applied by anyone. I’d like it if the Libertarian Party changed its name to “Liberal Party” or something like that, since it’s not much good for anything else.
“LIBERALISM In the Classical Tradition”, Third Edition, 1985, was the big step toward libertarianism in my life. I think it was a book review in National Review that led me to it. After reading it I bought 100 of them and gave them to colleagues, family and friends. It is the source of the main article of yesterday, written in 1927.
After re-reading the article and the comments above and the problem touched on in my article of 2nd January 2006, http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/george4.html , I lean toward using the word ‘liberalism’, perhaps prefixed or suffixed with ‘true’ or ‘classical’, in describing our convictions. There’s a bit of ‘in your face’ in so doing; I like that.
Chuck George, Fairhope, Alabama
Until thirty years ago, the distinction between “libertarianism” and “classical liberalism” was not practised by the French people. They were talking about “liberalism”.
Nowadays, socialists or communists do no more use the word “liberalism”, but they built the word “ultraliberalism” and they are practising a distinction between “liberalism” and “ultraliberalism”.
In fact, they qualified by the word “liberal” the “social-democrate policy”.
To-day, I am feeling that we should denounce this game of words and we should confront the word “ultraliberalism”, i.e. the real liberalism, to the “infradeterminist philosophy”, the kernel of the socialism or of the communism (cf. http://georgeslane.tooblog.fr/?Le-retour-de-la-societe-civile/p13)
Until thirty years ago, the distinction between “libertarianism” and “classical liberalism” was not practised by the French people. They were talking about “liberalism”.
Nowadays, socialists or communists do no more use the word “liberalism”, but they built the word “ultraliberalism” and they are practising a distinction between “liberalism” and “ultraliberalism”.
In fact, they qualified by the word “liberal” the “social-democrate policy”.
To-day, I am feeling that we should denounce this game of words and we should confront the word “ultraliberalism”, i.e. the real liberalism, to the “infradeterminist philosophy”, the kernel of the socialism or of the communism (cf. http://georgeslane.tooblog.fr/?Le-retour-de-la-societe-civile/p13
I’ve had a look at the quotes and at my copy of Human Action, but everything seems to indicate that Mises was a great supporter of democracy in the ordinary meaning of the word, not one with an “exit clause”. This one is interesting:
“The capitalistic social order, therefore, is an economic democracy in the strictest sense of the word. In the last analysis, all decisions are dependent on the will of the people as consumers.”
An economic democracy would be a system in which each shareholder was entitled to one vote, regardless of how much he invested in a company. The whole financial system would collapse if such a policy were adopted. History shows that the only stable political system is one in which the right to vote is proportional to the amount of money invested in the system itself. That is the real political equivalent of market capitalism. Unfortunately even the most progressive liberal reformers cannot see this. Just like the eastern bloc dissidents wanted “socialism with a human face”, they want a “liberal democracy”, but this too is a contradiction in terms.
Marco,
I believe Mises was referring to the idea of people ruling through economic, not political means. By using ‘the strictest sense of the word’ he was referring to the market process as giving autonomy and freedom to every individual, not a systematic and imposed political process, such as a State.
That is what contemporary language calls ‘democracy’, and exalts its increasingly useless voting system as the be-all and end all holy God, etc.
Mises was completely at odds with that, and I believe you have misunderstood that passage.
And with the phrase ‘people ruling by economic means’, I refer to the respect of property rights as understood by most libertarians.
If you look a single quote, you can read into it anything you want. If you look at what Mises wrote on democracy in its entirety (e.g. Human Action, Bureaucracy) the obvious conclusion is that he was a supporter of democracy in the ordinary sense of the word. Take for example Bureaucracy (1944). In Part I Mises argues that the State is necessary, and with it a certain amount of bureaucracy.
“…he was a supporter of democracy in the ordinary sense of the word.”
Does the ordinary sense of the word democracy include voluntary association with the state and hence allow for free and easy secession from the state and forming one’s own local government? If yes, then i’ll concede Mises supported democracy in the ordinary sense of the word because that is what he advocated. Otherwise, he definitely did not.
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