I am not an economist, but an historian, and so I would like to illuminate both the threat and the choice by looking back to another period when Western civilisation faced a similar predicament. I would like to cite two witnesses: one for the defence of the West, the other for the prosecution. In his 1927 book Liberalismus (later translated as Liberalism in the Classical Tradition), Ludwig von Mises considered the question of whether the civilisation built on liberalism and capitalism would go the way of older cultures, as the "dilettantes" (he had in mind Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West) had been prophesying. The Spenglerian pessimists were wrong, thought Mises: 

Modern civilisation will not perish unless it does so by its own act of self-destruction. No external enemy can destroy it the way the Spaniards once destroyed the civilisation of the Aztecs, for no one on earth can match his strength against the standard-bearers of modern civilisation. Only inner enemies can threaten it. It can come to an end only if the ideas of liberalism are supplanted by an anti-liberal ideology hostile to social cooperation.

Note that Mises is not conferring a spurious immortality on Western (or, as he prefers to call it, "European") civilisation: he concedes that it could be hollowed out from within. That, of course, is precisely what happened, at least in continental Europe. Following the Crash and the subsequent Depression, the critics of capitalism and liberalism gained the ascendancy in the battle of ideas. In 1931, four years after Mises warned against the "enemy within", Ferdinand Fried published Das Ende des Kapitalismus ("The End of Capitalism"). Whereas Mises was a lone voice crying in the wilderness, even in Vienna, the marginalised capital of a defunct empire, Fried was the leading figure in an influential Berlin-based circle of nationalist intellectuals around the cutting-edge journal Die Tat ("The Deed"). Today, Mises is still read as a liberal classic, while Fried is forgotten, but at the time Fried's critique of capitalism from the radical Right was even more sensational than the more familiar one from the Left. Here is the choice that Germany faced, as Fried saw it:

On one side stands the declining "West", itself already beginning to disintegrate, and with it the entire complex of the capitalist spirit: the free market, debt, the gold standard, world trade and stock markets, international capital flows, stimulation of demand, advertising, cost price calculation, export drives — all of them about to smash themselves in the present crisis. On the other side...redistribution of wealth, debt relief, "the bondage of interest rates", doubts about gold and the present conception of money, the right to work and above all the right to life, national and ethnic solidarity, economics as self-sufficiency, the authority of the state.

‹ previous123456next ›