Having thus set up this existential choice in terms that are uncannily reminiscent of 21st-century anti-capitalist campaigners, Fried then focuses on Germany. He sees Germany as the heart of a divided Europe, while Germany itself is in turn divided between a capitalist West and an agrarian East, with Berlin as a capitalist "enclave". Germany, as one of the debtor nations, is destined to take its place in the "world in revolt": "In the coming clash of civilisations, Germany, as the country most exposed to the impact of Western ideas, has been assigned the most important task, perhaps even the leading role." 

Anyone who has studied the writings and speeches of anti-Western leaders such as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran or President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, of leftist and environmentalist intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein, but above all of Osama bin Laden and his fellow Islamists, will recognise these sentiments of Ferdinand Fried. Germany no longer has such an exalted role in the anti-Western camp, whose leadership has numerous other claimants today. 

Capitalism, now as then, is an integral part of the Western civilisation. For friends and foes of that civilisation, the Judaeo-Christian and Enlightenment traditions that enabled capitalism to emerge are part of a seamless whole, a complex of natural and man-made law, of virtues and values without which a market economy cannot function. More important even than the rule of law or representative democracy, however, is the idea of an open society, a public square, in which freedom of speech and of the press are guaranteed. It is this freedom of access to the realm of public opinion that enables Western societies to criticise and correct their faults. The marketplace of ideas and opinions makes possible the marketplace of goods and services. Where the former is lacking, the latter is defective. Conformism, repression and corruption go hand in hand, as we see under authoritarian and totalitarian regimes everywhere. Mises thought illiberal ideologies were the political equivalents of neuroses in psychoanalysis: pathological compulsions that enabled the neurotic to live a lie, eine Lebenslüge, shielding him from reality in a bizarre comfort-zone where fear and loathing replace love and security. Even if we do not share the very Viennese faith in Freud of Mises, we may agree that those who hate Western civilisation, and especially those who are its products, suffer from profoundly masochistic guilt complexes that are immune from rationality. And we may also accept that it is healthy for the neurotic to be exposed to reality, by whatever means. Those who represent our politics and culture need to be given a regular reality check, however unwelcome this may be.

How well is the public sphere in Germany functioning? Consider, first, the case of Thilo Sarrazin. Just because his book Deutschland schafft sich ab ("Germany is abolishing itself") and the subsequent controversy have become so notorious, we should not assume that this outcome was inevitable. As long ago as 1999, Peter Hitchens, a prominent English journalist, published an indictment of Tony Blair's "cultural revolution" with an almost identical title: The Abolition of Britain (Quartet). Rather than generate a nationwide debate, however, the book was met with almost total silence. Last year, he updated it under the new title The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way (Continuum). Once again, the book was killed by silence.