How Does Liberalism Justify Fascism?
According to Khabar Online News Agency, Ruhollah Sepandarand wrote in IBNA’s Religion and Thought service: Many liberals mock a quote from some left-wing forces, which states that true socialism has not yet been realized anywhere in the world. However, these liberals probably have not yet correctly read the opinions of some prominent liberal thinkers, who also believe that liberalism has not yet been realized. This is not a personal interpretation; it is enough to turn to von Mises, one of the loyalists to classical liberalism, who considers liberalism a political program that has never been fully implemented anywhere or at any time.
In a book titled ‘Liberalism,’ he states that to understand what liberalism is, one should not turn to history, because liberalism has never succeeded in implementing its program as intended anywhere. Ludwig von Mises was one of the most prominent economists of the ‘Austrian School,’ whose ideas, along with figures like Hayek, became one of the most important theoretical sources in liberal philosophy and economics, and a significant part of economic policymaking and decision-making is still based on their theories.
In the book ‘Liberalism,’ he writes that liberalism is neither a religion, nor a worldview, nor a special interest party. Liberalism is something entirely different. It is an ideology; it is a theory about the relationships among social affairs and, at the same time, the application of this theory to human behavior in social affairs.
His view of liberalism as the sole path to human happiness has precisely those aspects that are, ironically, criticized by liberals regarding socialist ideas. Von Mises states in this book that the existence of poverty and misery in the world is not an argument against liberalism. Liberalism, in fact, wants to eliminate this poverty and misery and believes that the tools it proposes are the only useful tools for achieving this goal. Anyone who thinks they know a better or even just another way to achieve this goal must prove it.
Von Mises, a staunch opponent of government intervention in societal welfare and economic affairs, argues in defense of social inequalities that humans are unequal and will remain unequal. Reasonable goal-oriented reflections dictate that humans should be treated equally before the law. But liberalism neither desires nor can desire more than this.
Therefore, it is not surprising that he is also seriously opposed to any form of wealth redistribution and emphasizes that if humanity today possesses and can consume this amount of wealth annually, it is only because our social system recognizes inequality of ownership.
With this approach, he must staunchly defend private ownership of the means of production and stand against Marxists, as von Mises claims that the capitalist system based on private ownership is the only possible and conceivable social system. Note that he says ‘the only’ possible social system.
Von Mises believes that as long as unemployment benefits are paid, unemployment will not disappear. But he does not explain why unemployment has not disappeared in societies where unemployment benefits are not paid, probably because he would have to refer to the reserve army of the unemployed, which is a vital necessity for turning the wheels of capitalism.
But perhaps one of the most controversial parts of this book and von Mises’s views is the issue of liberalism’s encounter with fascism. Before delving into this issue in the book ‘Liberalism,’ let me refer to something outside of this book. Herbert Marcuse, in a writing titled ‘The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian Conception of Government,’ quotes von Mises as saying that fascism saved the civilized way of Europe and that the service fascism rendered would remain eternal in history.
Mehdi Tadayoni, the translator of von Mises’s book, refers to this very quote by Marcuse in his introduction to it and claims that Marcuse omitted important qualifiers from von Mises’s statements to make the sentence appear laudatory. But the interesting point is that Tadayoni himself has translated both Marcuse’s article and von Mises’s book ‘Liberalism,’ yet he believes that omitting the qualifiers from von Mises’s sentence leads to a misunderstanding by the reader.
As a conclusion to this article, I will quote verbatim von Mises’s statements from the book ‘Liberalism,’ with Mehdi Tadayoni’s own translation, so that we may understand how much more the omitted qualifiers actually serve as evidence supporting Marcuse’s view, and that, in fact, Marcuse softened it by omitting those qualifiers.
Von Mises, in this book, in the tenth section of its first chapter, writes about the period after the Bolsheviks came to power, to justify and defend fascism: ‘It cannot be denied that fascism and all similar dictatorial endeavors are full of good intentions, and their intervention at this juncture saved European civilization. The service fascism has rendered by this act will live on eternally in history.’ Probably, if Marcuse had included those ‘good intentions’ of fascism that von Mises used, in his writing, he could have better depicted liberalism’s justification of fascism.
