...the Austrian school--...Mises and Hayk especially--whose defense of the market against state planning and socialist distribution had the on a new credibility in the light of the tyranny and economic disorder of the Bolshevik experiment.
--Roger Scruton, "The Journey Home" The Intercollegiate Review 31-28, 31 (2009)
I suppose this is technically correct to describe Mises and Hayek as a reaction to Bolshevism. and I don't suppose many readers will gag at Scruton's phrasing, but I think it think it obscures an important question. That is: how did two men (with a spare "von" before), each nurtured in so venerable, so august an institution as the Austrian Empire, have become such pillars of anti-statism?
There's a plausible answer, once you stop to think about it. That is: a good man might turn libertarian precisely because-not in spite of--its "conservative" trappings. The point is that the Austrian Empire, so venerable and so august, was also a blinking mess: a grotesque anachronism and a drain on the lifeblood of anything like a vigorous and dynamic modern economy. The Austrian Empire loved the First and Second Estates well enough--the military and the church--well enough, but for 19th-Century liberalism it had entertained something worse than contempt: it nourished incomprehension. Couple that with the fact that in the Empire nothing worked. Well: the Emperor worked, so they say, every day of his life. But the whole enterprise, so it is also said, came to represent a great antique cuckoo clock, ticking slowly and ever more slowly until it finally ground to a halt.
There's a plausible answer, once you stop to think about it. That is: a good man might turn libertarian precisely because-not in spite of--its "conservative" trappings. The point is that the Austrian Empire, so venerable and so august, was also a blinking mess: a grotesque anachronism and a drain on the lifeblood of anything like a vigorous and dynamic modern economy. The Austrian Empire loved the First and Second Estates well enough--the military and the church--well enough, but for 19th-Century liberalism it had entertained something worse than contempt: it nourished incomprehension. Couple that with the fact that in the Empire nothing worked. Well: the Emperor worked, so they say, every day of his life. But the whole enterprise, so it is also said, came to represent a great antique cuckoo clock, ticking slowly and ever more slowly until it finally ground to a halt.
