Chapter 22. Fragmentation of the Movement The emergence of the Austro-libertarian
movement in America reached its high point in the year 1956. Ten years of continuous expansion
ushered in a torrent of important publications and other breakthroughs. In 1955, Hans Zenholz published
his first book. In early 1956, his wife Mary edited a fest schrift for Mises that documented
The Austro-libertarian Network of Intellectuals. Mises himself published The Anti-Capitalisting
Mentality and gave the opening address at the 1956 Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Berlin
on the Permanent Inflation. Also in 1956, Murray Rothbard received his PhD in economics
from Columbia University and Zen Holtz obtained his first position at Grove City College.
1956 was also the year when Mises began to receive outward signs of recognition.
In 1937, the Vienna Commerce saw to have Mises promoted to the rank of a Hofrat or courts
Mises' counselor, the highest rank attainable for non-political appointees among the Austrian
civil servants, but Hitler's takeover prevented this. Mises then had to wait until he was
almost 75 to receive public recognition. In June 1956, he was accorded a $15,000 William
Volcker Distinguished Service Award. A year later, he received an honorary doctorate from
Grove City College and other honors followed over the next few years. The most lasting
One sign of the veneration that Mises enjoyed in those days is the bronze bust that George
Cota arranged to be made also in 1956.
Recognition for lifetime achievement is usually accompanied by a winding down.
So it was in the case of Mises and of the movement he inspired in the 1950s.
In personal public appearances he began to feel his age.
He had never been an orator but had always been impressive, especially in smaller settings,
for his encompassing knowledge of the subject and for his lucid and systematic exposition.
This flame shone for the last time at the Princeton Montpelerin Society meeting in 1958
and in a series of lectures he gave in Buenos Aires in 1959.
Thereafter his frailty weighed ever more heavily.
Already in 1956-1957 he had not felt well for many months.
In May at the end of the academic year he looked forward to spending a long vacation
in Austria and Switzerland. He was increasingly hard of hearing and was soon unable to conduct
seminar discussions without the assistance of Percy Graves.
It was at this point that a strategic weakness of the burgeoning Austro-libertarian movement
began to be felt quite painfully, the age gap. Between the almost octogenarian Mises
and his major thirty-something disciples, Zenholz, Rothbard and Kirzner in particular,
There was no intermediate generation to take leadership from Mises's faltering hands.
Henry Hazlitt and Leonard Reed were the right age, but were thought of as mere popularizers
of the ideas of others.
They lacked the authority to lead what was, after all, an intellectual movement.
Mary Zenholz had argued that Reed was underestimated as an intellectual figure.
The libertarian movement now came under the influence of those who were already intellectual
Authorities and in the prime age for leadership, but not really Misesians in the Austro-libertarian
sense. By the early 1960s, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand had acquired
solid reputations as writers and were ready for national recognition as the leaders of
an intellectual movement. It was due to their unrivaled impact that in the 1960s Austro-libertarianism
came to be largely supplanted by other libertarian and conservative movements. The most visible
Several signs of this paradigm shift were the displacement of the Freeman by National
Review established in 1955, the takeover of the Mont Pelerin Society by Chicago School
neoliberals in the 1960s, and the emergence of an organised Randian or Objectivist movement.
All this occurred while American mass opinion was being converted to the gospel of interventionism
and socialism. Mises must have been shocked about the results of a survey among American
The high school seniors, as reported in a 1955 letter to the editor of the Wall Street
Journal, asked about their attitudes toward free enterprise, 82% said they did not believe
that there was business competition in the United States, 60% said owners received too
much profit, 76% believed owners got most of the gains from new machinery, 55% championed
the postulate from each according to ability to each according to needs, 61% rejected the
The Profit Motive as the driving force of the economic system and 60% said workers should
not produce all they could.
Austro-libertarianism simmered on a low flame for the next two decades.
It lingered as an underground movement centred around Hans-Zen Holtz, Murray Rothbard and
starting in the 1970s, also around Israel Kirzner and Ludwig Lachmann.
The movement was further weakened through internal strife.
The most important disagreement concerned the anarchy question.
This is a minimal state necessary to preserve a free society.
The Rothbardian anarchists rejected the state entirely, claiming that its protection and
contract enforcement functions were, like all other services, better served by free
market competition than government monopoly.
This stance cost them the support of the classical liberal groups around Leonard Reed and Hans
Zenholz, who advocated minimal state or monarchist solutions.
Yet, the coherence and radicalism of Rothbard's views attracted many of the brightest young minds, and when Austro-libertarianism re-emerged as a powerful intellectual force in the 1980s and 90s, with the Ludwig von Mises Institute at its epicentre, it did so under the intellectual leadership of Murray Rothbard.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mises witnessed the rise of an American conservative mass
movement and of the neoliberal Chicago School within the Montpilerin Society. He saw some
of his most promising students abandon their support for free enterprise.
Conservative Movement and Libertarian Remnant By the mid-1950s, the Freeman had accomplished
It's goal of rallying the disparate libertarian forces, the remnant, as Albert J. Nock would
call them, yet its financial and organisational difficulties had opened the gates for another
non-leftist periodical which would consolidate the forces on the American right from a far
less libertarian point of view than the Freeman. National Review burst onto the American scene
in the fall of 1955. Its driving force was the young editor-in-chief, William F. Buckley
Buckley Jr. a Yale graduate with a strong anti-communist pedigree. During his studies
he had gathered informational professors and fellow students for the FBI. Buckley absorbed
the editorial talent that was unable to find a home at the Freeman, in particular Suzanne
Lafollette and William Henry Chemlin, but also such men as Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer,
Max Eastman and Erich von Kuhnelt-Lehlin. When Buckley announced National Review as
Frankly conservative, old world men such as Mises must have thought that, frankly, Buckley
did not know what he was talking about. Mises did contribute a few pieces in the course of the first
few years of National Review's existence, but on more than one occasion he emphasised the difference
between libertarianism and conservatism. In response to birthday greetings in 1957 he wrote,
In October 1954, Mises declined an invitation from Yale University to participate in a series
called Conservative Lectures, which was promoted with the promise that each lecturer will work
consciously to a restoration of the power of the word conservative.
He noted that the word conservative had no political roots in America, and that in Europe
it meant the very opposite of the principles for which America stood. To conserve means
to preserve what exists. It is an empty programme. It is merely negative, rejecting any change.
To conserve what exists is in present-day America tantamount to preserving those laws
and institutions that the New Deal and the Fair Deal have bequeathed to the nation.
The sudden emergence of the word conservative highlighted a more general unease of the counter-revolutionary
forces in the United States. They were quite sure what they were against – communism,
fascism, socialism, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, etc. – but what did they stand for?
The fact is that even in the leadership of the New Movement, economic knowledge and staunch
libertarian convictions were rare. The recourse to words like conservatism reflected a widespread
When Mises emphasized in the paper the crucial importance of an independent judicial apparatus
that protects the individual and his property against any violator, whether king or common
and Robber.
The secretary of the Earhart Foundation wondered whether this might not be too radical. After
all, judges in the United States were all appointed and paid by the government. Mises
replied that the American judges were independent insofar as they could not be removed or prosecuted
even if their decisions were not palatable to the executive. In contrast, the insistence
on limited government was at best useful in the present-day American fight against the
The Attempts to Make the Government Step-by-Step Totalitarian
Mises went on, but there is no doubt that outside of this special field this term is
meaningless as it does not indicate in what regard the government ought to be limited.
Union bosses could for instance refer to this slogan to justify non-interference on the
part of the government whenever strikers commit acts of violence, sabotage, etc.
It was therefore of vital importance that one advocate clearly the supremacy of private
property and its offshoots, capitalism and the market economy. Insistence on federalism
and decentralisation would not do. Decentralisation on a federal basis gives in itself no guarantee
that freedom will be preserved. Medieval feudalism had both decentralisation and federalism,
but only the lords were free and tax-exempt. Burgers and peasants had to endure legal disabilities,
no share in the government and had a loan to pay taxes.
These were very good reasons not to use the label conservative for the new American movement
that rejected communism, socialism, the new D.U. and the emerging anti-market mentality
of the ever more statist mainstream, but the die was cast. Four years after the establishment
of National Review, the label conservative held the public arena. By that time at the
Mises must have outlived the optimism he had felt in the early days of the freemen. He
reverted to the pessimistic outlook that had become almost second nature. When his student
George Reisman said he had the impression that the laissez-faire liberals were growing
in numbers, Mises replied that this was the natural impression of a person who was still
in the process of getting to know the other scattered individuals of the remnant. Such
Such a person might think there are ever more individuals to share his views, because he
comes to know ever more such individuals, but Mises believed that the growth was only
in personal acquaintance and not in absolute numbers.
On another occasion he commented that his writings were like the Dead Sea Scrolls that
someone would find a thousand years from now.
But pessimism did not prevent Mises from fighting the good fight and from encouraging others
to be strong in the battle of ideas. In a letter to Hayek, who had also vigorously rejected
the label of conservative, Mises wrote,
I completely agree with your rejection of conservatism. In his book Up from Liberalism,
Buckley, as a person of fine and educated man, has clearly defined his standpoint. Conservatism
is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is
is behind us, but the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given
to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot
outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before.
Origines, Augustinus and Thomas Aquinas have said the same thing in other words. It is
a sad truth that this program is more attractive than everything that has been said about liberty
and about the idealistic and materialistic benefits of the free economy.
What were the reasons for this, Anne Truth?
Mises felt there was here an unexplored question.
He went on.
I assume that you, just as I, do not right to console yourself with the proverb, Dixie
et salva vi anima meam, I have spoken and thus saved my soul.
Hence there is the question, how is it possible that the elite of our contemporaries is absolutely
How does it come, for example, that the sugar price policy of the American government is
hardly ever contested, even though out of 500 or 1,000 voters there is at most one who
can expect advantages from an institutionally increased sugar price? The problem I have
in mind is not the behaviour of the mass of intellectuals and of those who count themselves
among the intellectuals. I mean those authors, both fiction and non-fiction, who for example
Demise of the Sirkle Bastia
The only work that matched Human Action as a literary monument to the libertarian renaissance
of the early post-war period was Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. Mises was a great admirer
of this work and said so in a letter to its author.
Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. It is also, or may I say first of all, a cogent
analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology
of our self-styled intellectuals, and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies
adopted by governments and political parties. It is a devastating exposure of the moral
cannibals, the gigalos of science, and of the academic prattle of the makers of the
anti-industrial revolution. You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told
them. You are inferior, and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for
Before he read Atlas Shrugged, Mises had not counted Ayn Rand among the foremost contemporary
artists and philosophers.
In the original Rand circle in Manhattan, and in many of the later Randian groups throughout
the United States, many members cultivated religious reverence for the writings and opinions
of Ayn Rand. Their attitude to Rand's writings did not differ essentially from the attitude
that Christians hold to the Bible, and consequently they were in more than one respect the acolytes
of a Randian church. Rothbard, who had personally attended the meetings of Rand's group for
several months, stated that the fanaticism with which they worship Rand and Brandon has
to be seen to be believed, the whole atmosphere being a kind of combination of religious cult
and a Trotsky cell. They demanded unconditional allegiance to their creed and harassed and
ousted anyone who would not go along with the party line. One position of the creed
particularly dear to these Ranyans was atheism, the religious belief in the non-existence
of God. For Ayn Rand and her disciples it had always been a matter of course to contest
any evidence purporting to prove the existence of God and to emphasise any argument or piece
The Unconditional Adoption of Atheism
One might argue that the Randian insistence on action in conformity with its atheistic
ideal was a healthy attitude to preserve and cultivate purism, and indeed from this point
of view Randianism might be as legitimate as any other religion. It was however not
the attitude that Murray Rothbard brought to his encounters with fellow human beings.
He had a firm opinion on various questions, but he was mainly interested in argument and
debate as the best method to test positions and opinions.
When it became obvious that he preferred being married to Joanne, to being numbered among
the Randians, things turned ugly. In early summer 1958 Rothbard was asked to abandon his
theistic wife. He refused to comply. This incident had direct repercussions on the Austro-libertarian
Movement, in that it led to the disintegration of the Circular Bastia, the Misesian study
group that met at Murray Rothbard's apartment, and had included Hessen, Ligio, Raco and Reisman.
Hessen and Reisman remained in the Randian orbit and had no further contact with their
former friends, who had in their view betrayed reason. Rothbard in turn pulled no punches
about what he came to call the Ayn Rand cult. He later had telephone shouting matches with
Nathaniel Brandon, a man who took pride in outdoing everyone else in worshipping his
mistress in both connotations.
Brandon charged Rothbard with plagiarism and threatened him with a lawsuit alleging that
Rothbard in a recent paper had adopted ideas from Ayn Rand and Brandon's wife Barbara without
duly acknowledging this intellectual debt. The charge was baseless. It cost Rothbard's
friend Leonard Ligio only a couple of hours of work in a public library to document that
The stolen ideas had been part of the Western intellectual heritage for several centuries
and had originated in many cases with Catholic scholastic thinkers. Mises had taken part
in the symposium on relativism at which Rothbard had presented the original version of the
paper under dispute. The symposium took place in 1959 at Emory University. The Volcker Fund
sponsored it. Helmut Schuck, a professor of sociology at Emory, organised the event. Schuck
Rock also wrote the most scathing indictment of the charges made against Rothbard. About
Rand and Barbara Brandon, he said, they clearly suffer from a serious case of what Sorokin,
Fadds and Feubels calls the discoverer's complex. They seem to think that they, the
female innovators of unique ideas, were robbed by a bad male.
Mises was speechless at the Randians' charge of plagiarism against Rothbard, but he avoided
and any direct involvement in the controversy which he was sure would resolve itself in
Rothbard's favour.
Mises had good reason not to create even more bad blood between his disciples and the Randians.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Brandon's organisation was very successful in selling Mises' writings,
in particular planning for freedom.
At the end of 1961, the book was almost sold out, and Nymeyer planned an extended second
edition, including an additional essay.
The organisation that was very successful in selling Mises's books was the Intercollegiate
Society of Individualists.
Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Brandon also tried to establish closer ties with Mises, inviting
him to attend their lecture evenings and social gatherings. Mises reciprocated to a certain
extent. He appreciated intellectual affinities with the Randians, but he was not fond of
their fanatical zeal. He liked to persuade other people through detached speech and writing,
Whereas the Randians strove to make converts to the cause of objectivism by applying the
same techniques used by religious cons, group sessions, psychoanalysis and group pressure.
Mises could perfectly well respect and even befriend people with whom he disagreed, even
when these disagreements concerned questions of fundamental importance. This was the case,
for example, with Louis Auger, a positivist, Gottfried von Habeler, an interventionist,
Louise Zommer, a protectionist, and Murray Rothbard, an anarchist.
It goes without saying that he did not avoid socialising with honest socialists. Cases in
point were the Bowers, until their fallout with Mises in 1919, as well as his critic
Carl Landauer, whom he probably met in 1952 at Berkeley, and he wrote letters of recommendation
for interventionist professors. Leland Jaeger, a monetarist, once wrote to Mises, I hope
Hope you agree that among people who are united in favour of economic liberalism, there can
be a healthy controversy on such details as the admissibility of the price-level concept
and whether the gold standard or price-level stabilisation is the better rule for monetary
policy. And this hope was entirely justified despite the fact that Jaeger's disagreements
with Mises concerned more than mere details. Mises would not hold anyone in low esteem
just because the person in question held opinions that Mises believed were entirely wrong. Steeped
In the Humanism of the Christian Occident, he held the individual above anything else.
He was not concerned about individual souls, of course, but he did care supremely about
individual liberty.
He was happy for each new convert to the cause of liberty, but he would have been unable
to rejoice over conversions obtained through group pressure and other forms of harassment.
For Mises, only one sin was unforgivable, lack of integrity.
Speaking and behaving against one's better knowledge could not be excused.
This is why Mises maintained a lifelong friendship with Gottfried Habeler, whom he believed to
be an honest interventionist, but broke with Fritz Machlup when he started qualifying the
case for the gold standard.
At the same time, Mises recommended Leland Jaeger for Montpelerin Society stipends, even
though Jaeger was no less skeptical of gold money than Machlup.
But the Iranian mind was not overly concerned with the trifling virtue of integrity.
There was only reason, always capitalized, and whoever did not come to endorse reason
The decision, as defined by the Ayn Randt Church, had to be stupid, evil or hard of
hearing.
Being friends with such a person was out of the question.
The Randian way of dealing with disagreements was to confront the dissenter with a stark
choice.
Either undergo an endless series of discussions with the foregone conclusion that the dissenter
had fallen prey to the heresy of irrationalism, or be expelled from the group and shunned
by all its members.
In the fall of 1961 Nathaniel Brandon showed once again that bullying his opponents was
his forte.
The New Individualist Review, a journal edited by Ralph Reiko, who was by then a doctoral
student in Chicago under Hayek, had published a critical piece on Ayn Rand.
This prompted Brandon to ask Hayek, who was on the editorial board of the review, publicly
to dissociate himself from the author of the article and to insist an apology to his Rand
be printed in the New Individualist Review on your behalf and in your name.
He also sent a copy of the letter to Mises, who was certainly happy to have kept the Randians
at arm's length.
Of course, Hayek never complied.
Mises abhorred such bullying.
He had a different way of dealing with smears.
In the fall of 1961, Mises and Rand met at a party in Henry Hazlitt's house.
It was not their first personal meeting.
They also met in early July 1961 and they discussed the problems which we both consider
as vital. It is possible they stayed in touch in the 1960s. In June 1970 Mises promised
his Mexican friend Velasco that he would talk to her about him and his work. After dinner
a discussion between them turned into an argument on philosophical principle and drew the attention
of the bystanders. It is not clear what was said, even though there were a number of topics
In Correspondence with Mutesius, he said that Ayn Rand was the most energetic opponent of
Antitrust Policy. In any case, Russell Kirk, a notorious critic of Randianism, who had
witnessed the discussion, was later reported to have said in his lectures before student
audiences that Mises had called Ayn Rand a silly little Jew girl. When the report was
brought to Mises's attention, he immediately wrote to Kirk, I never called Mrs. Ayn Rand,
or for that matter anyone else, a silly little Jew girl. I should be obliged if you would
not repeat this false story in the future.
Kirk denied it all.
Your informant, with the eccentricity and fanaticism characteristic of the Ranian cult,
seems to have combined details from several accounts of the meeting between yourself and
Miss Rand, which she had heard, and to have attributed the composite story to me.
Any anti-Jewish prejudice or suggestion thereof was not contained in my second-hand account
nor in the account which I heard, but I'm glad to have from Mr. Hazlitt a more accurate
Report of the Encounter Before Receiving Your Letter
Against the Neoliberals
The Montpelerin Society had begun as an ecumenical undertaking, bringing together purebred liberals
of the classical tradition and neoliberals, who endorsed interventionist schemes to one
degree or another. From the beginning, Mises had been sceptical about the ecumenical concept,
but for the first five or six years his apprehensions seemed unwarranted, even though the
and the organization of all Mont Pelerin activities lay in the hands of a devout neoliberal, Alfred Hohnolt, from Switzerland, who Mises had first met at the 1928 Zurich meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik.
An admirer of Roth's serfdom, Hohnolt had been among those who encouraged Hayek to convene the foundational meeting of the Society at Mont Pelerin, and he had also raised substantial funds for the event.
At this meeting, the ambitious Hounault was elected Secretary of the Society, but after
a few years, he was no longer satisfied with his position under Hayek. His long-term goal
was to become Mont Pelerin Society President. His strategy was to make himself irreplaceable.
He dealt with the smallest details of organisation and, by the mid-1950s, started to handle correspondence
without consulting Hayek, who resented these encroachments from a man he did not exactly
After 1956, the conflict between the two men grew more intense and eventually came to a
clash that brought this society to the verge of dissolution.
In the early years, this clash was barely visible.
With the support of Hohenoldt and others, the neoliberals steadily increased their numbers,
but they did not dominate this society.
The main reason was probably that although Hohenoldt had financial backing in the Swiss
Hayek, Mises and a few other classical liberals had a primordial impact on the selection of
topics to be discussed.
On the one hand, this was due to their scientific pedigree.
On the other, they enjoyed substantial financial backing from the Volcker Fund and from individuals
such as Neumeier, Greed and Crane.
At least until the end of 1953, the Volcker Fund paid the membership fees and often also
covered travel expenditure for virtually all non-US members of the Montpilarin Society.
And the Fund was eager to accommodate Mises' wishes, and probably Hayek's wishes also,
when it came to securing financially the presence of certain members at the meetings. For example,
when Mises declared that he would not attend the 1954 meeting in Venice because of insufficient
For French and British participation, the Volcker Fund asked them to handpick the beneficiaries
of financial assistance in order of their relative importance.
Mises named among the French economists one Louis Boudin, two Daniel Villet, three François
Trevaux, and four Bertrand de Jouvenil. Among the British, one Dukes, two Plant and three
Denison, as well as the Irishman Duncan, Mises did not attend the Venice meeting because
2 years later he approved to the funding of Coase, Nutter, Alkin, Philbrook and Jaeger.
At the end of that first phase of the history of the Montpilarin Society, therefore, the
leadership around Hayek was far more radically libertarian than most of the regular members,
especially those from Europe. The coexistence within the Montpilarin Society of groups with
such different orientations was well known by its members. It was also fairly obvious
A case in point was Jean-Pierre Amelius, a young professor of business and economics in Luxembourg, whom Mises knew through correspondence.
At that point, Amelius was 29 years old.
Amelius had recently discovered the literature of classical liberalism, which he devoured and translated into French and German.
Mises had him invited for the 1953 Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Seydisberg. He also suggested
invitations for Fertig, Courtney and Neumeyer. These three men were admitted as new members
in a council meeting of Hayek, Rappard, Ittah, Mises and Houlot.
Hamilius immediately noticed that the society was divided along the lines of ideological
orientation and language into different groups and clans. He himself felt closest affinities
to the American group of Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, Morley, Furtick and Miller. From the other
participants who did not know that he had gotten his invitation through Mises, he heard
reservations about the Old Guard Mises, Hayek, who were sometimes called the Old Conservatives.
The young professor from Luxembourg was eagerly taking notes and discussing the interventionist
schemes of various members who were not yet part of the Old Guard. Thus John von Sickle
Ludwig Erhard proposed taxing rich heirs, Wilhelm Röpke favoured subsidies for homeowners,
and Otto Weidt argued that heavy taxation would not deter entrepreneurs from working.
Ludwig Erhard, fresh from the victory of his party in the 1953 elections in Germany, also
gave a talk at the meeting.
Hermannius' report shed light on the change of relative weights within the society that
resulted from the apparent success of Ludwig Erhard's neoliberal policies in Germany,
and the so-called Wirtschaftswunder or economic miracle.
To the socialists and social democrats who dominated the climate of mainstream economic
opinion at the time, it was truly miraculous that the abolition of price controls and the
transition from a centrally planned economy to a demarcated economy would yield substantial
economic benefits.
For unrepentant classical liberals such as Mises there was no miracle at all, but Earhart's
was problematic because it gave unwarranted credentials to his middle-of-the-road philosophy.
This also applied to his closest advisors, who were often referred to as champions of the social market economy,
or leaders of the Ordo School of Economics, his Under Secretary of State Müller-Armack,
and the Professors Wilhelm Röpke, Geneva, Alexander Rüstorf, Heidelberg, and Walter Euken, Freiburg.
book. In short, the success of Earhart's initial classical liberal policies was used
to vindicate subsequent interventionist policies, in particular antitrust laws and inflation.
Even before the war, Mises did not have the highest opinion of most German economists.
After his emigration, he had avoided any closer involvement with them. He would acknowledge
Earhart's achievements by contributing to a fest drift in Earhart's honour, but he
Only after Gottfried Habeler pleaded a case of the editors did Mises agree to write a
piece on economic liberalism, a complement to Hayek's article on political liberalism.
His contribution was eventually published under the title Market. He delivered the work
before the end of March 1955. The publishers improved his article after having received
and the prospect of cooperating with a fashionable ordo school, be it in the Mont Pelerin society
or elsewhere, did not exactly warm his heart either. He believed the ordo people were hardly
better than the socialists he had fought all his life. In fact, he eventually called them
the ordo interventionists. It must be said, however, that he supported them whenever common
and Ground could be found.
Thus, in June 1950, he recommended the translation of Röpke's textbook Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft
to the University of Chicago Press, and his New York associates seemed to have harbored
essentially the same views, but without Mises's hesitation to express such views in print.
There were classical liberals in Germany who opposed the interventionist excesses of the
Earhart Ministry and the Ordo School, the leaders of the laissez-faire group were Volkmar
by Mutesius and Hans Helwig. Mutesius, who was based in Frankfurt am Main, ran two successful
journals, Zeitschrift für das gesamte Kreditwesen and Monatsblätter für freiheitliche Wirtschaftspolitik.
But they could do no more than fight an honorable rearguard action. Being the night professorships
said the universities. Their foremost means of action was Mutesius' journal.