Omnipotent Government

Ludwin Von Mises wrote Omnipotent Government in 1944 at the last days of WWII. Mises describes the philosophical grounds of the Nazi movement. A book rich in history background and a though provoking plan for the future.

In the first part Mises explains the German Liberalism during the middle of the XIX when the ideas of the classical Liberalism were partially adopted in Germany. According to Mises:

"At about the middle of the nineteenth century those Germans interested in political issues were united in their adherence to liberalism. Yet the German nation did not succeed in shaking off the yoke of absolutism and in establishing democracy and parliamentary government."

Mises explains the history of Germany from the late XVIII to the early XX with a different point of view from the dominant Socialist Historians. Overall he shows how and why a powerful-educated German society fell into Nazism.

"The questions to be answered are not: Why did the bankers and the rich entrepreneurs and capitalists desert liberalism? Why did the professors, the doctors, and the lawyers not erect barricades? We must rather ask: Why did the German nation return to the Reichstag members who did not abolish absolutism? Why was the army, formed for a great part of men who voted the socialist or the Catholic ticket, unconditionally loyal to its commanders? Why could the antiliberal parties, foremost among them the Social Democrats, collect many millions of votes while the groups which remained faithful to the principles of liberalism lost more and more popular support? Why did the millions of socialist voters who indulged in revolutionary babble acquiesce in the rule of princes and courts?"

For Mises the German Liberals were unable to protect the principles and ideas that help them succeed. They saw Socialism and Nazism as temporary setbacks and never recognize the deep roots of Etatism. Soon Etatism armed with a strong military evolved into nationalism.

"As soon as liberalism reached Germany and Italy the problem of the extent of the state and its boundaries was raised. It solution seemed easy. The nation is the community of all people speaking the same language; the state's frontiers should coincide with the linguistic demarcations."

"The principle of nationality is an outcome of the interpretation which people in Central and Eastern Europe, who never fully grasped the meaning of liberal ideas, gave to the principle of self-determination. It is a distortion, not a perfection, of liberal thought."

The nationalism originally define as unity of language evolved  to unity of race. The idea that Germany was the strongest among European nations contrasted with the defeat after WWI and the unacceptable conditions of the Versailles Treaty. It fueled the legend of "the stab in the back" followed by the total failure of the Weimar Republic setting the conditions to the advent of Nazism. The party sold itself as the enemy of the communist to the liberals and as saver of the poor from the bourgeois. But overall a saver of the German Nationalism, nationalism now defined by race with a common enemy, Jews.

Mises' conclusion can be read two ways. Considering the era when The Omnipotent Government was published he recognize the improbability of a liberal world, necessary to discard aggression from other countries, plus the risk of government to close their borders establishing autarkic states and starting aggression against their neighbors to eliminate its dependency. 

"But will all men rightly understand their own interests? What if they do not? This is the weak point in the liberal plea for a free world of peaceful coöperation. The realization of the liberal plan is impossible because—at least for our time—people lack the mental ability to absorb the principles of sound economics. Most men are too dull to follow complicated chains of reasoning. Liberalism failed because the intellectual capacities of the immense majority were insufficient for the task of comprehension."

But sixty years later we can read his conclusion as a kind of prophecy of how humanity is condemned to live with the risk of war supporting strong armies as long as the different flavors of etatism are not replaced by liberalism, where goods and people move freely anywhere in the world.

Is capitalism an all or nothing global condition for peace? Are global coalitions and governments the only defense to totalitarian neighbors?

This book was the subject of the 2015 Socialism Seminar organized by the Center for the Study of Capitalism at Universidad Francisco Marroquin.

My rating 4 out of 5.