Vienna: capital of the century - The Economist (December 24, 2016)

ViennaHow Vienna produced ideas that shaped the West

The city of the century

The Economist, December 24, 2016

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Dec 24th 2016, 00:00

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ACROSS the cobbles of Vienna’s Michaelerplatz the world of empires, waltzes and mutton-chop whiskers glowers at the modern age of psychoanalysis, atonal music and clean shaves. In one corner, the monumental, neo-baroque entrance to the Hofburg palace, seat of the Habsburgs; in the other, the Looshaus, all straight lines and smooth façades, one of the first buildings in the international style. This outcrop of modernism, designed by Adolf Loos, was completed in 1911, less than 20 years after the dome-topped palace entrance it faces. But the building embodied such a different aesthetic, such a contrary world view, that some wondered whether a society that produced such opposites in quick succession could survive. The emperor Franz Joseph is said to have kept the curtains drawn so he would not have to look at the new world across the square.
The sceptics were right. Imperial Viennese society could not survive. But the ideas and art brought forth during the fecund period of Viennese history from the late 1880s to the 1920s endured—from Loos’s modernist architecture to Gustav Klimt’s symbolist canvasses, from Schoenberg’s atonal music and Mahler’s Sturm und Drang to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Those Viennese who escaped Nazism went on to sustain the West during the cold war, and to restore the traditions of empiricism and liberal democracy.
This ferment was part of a generational revolution that swept Europe at the end of the 19th century, from Berlin to London. But the Viennese rebellion was more intense, and more wide-ranging. And it provoked a more extreme reaction. Hitler arrived in Vienna from the Austrian provinces in 1908 and developed his theories of race and power there. Vienna was thus the cradle of modernism and fascism, liberalism and totalitarianism: the currents that have shaped much of Western thought and politics since Vienna itself started to implode in 1916 until the present day. It has been the Viennese century.
What distinguished pre-1914 Vienna from most other European capitals, and what gave the Viennese school its particular intellectual tang, was that it was an imperial city rather than a national capital. Vienna was the heart of an Austro-Hungarian empire of about 53m people that stretched from Innsbruck in the west almost as far as the Black Sea in the east. After 1867 the empire was divided into two: a Magyar-dominated Hungary, ruled from Budapest, and a heterogeneous, multi-ethnic, multilingual other half, ruled from Vienna. In deference to its multinational character, this half was not called Austria but was often referred to as Cisleithania, named after a tributary of the Danube.
In the second half of the 19th century Franz Joseph’s subjects poured into the city: Italians, Slovaks, Poles, Slovenians, Moravians, Germans and, especially, Czechs. By 1910 Vienna had a population of 2m, the sixth-biggest city in the world. Fortunes made in the fast-industrialising empire, many by Jewish and assimilated Jewish families such as the Wittgensteins and Ephrussi, changed the urban landscape. Their enormous palaces adorned the Ringstrasse, the city’s most elegant boulevard. By 1914 Jews made up about 5% of Cisleithania’s population. They did not enjoy rights as a nationality or language group, but benefited from full civil rights as individuals. As Carl Schorske, the greatest historian of the period has written, they “became the supranational people of the multinational state, the one folk which, in effect, stepped into the shoes of the earlier aristocracy. Their fortunes rose and fell with those of the liberal, cosmopolitan state.”
Vienna was a mixture of classes and nationalities, faiths and worldviews. Order a Wiener melange in a Viennese coffee-house today, suggests Steven Beller, a historian of Austria, stir the hot milk into your bitter coffee, and imperial Viennese culture emerges, a dissolving of differences to produce something fresh. The Viennese cultural elite encouraged intellectual collisions to give birth to the new. “There was sperm in the air,” as the writer Stefan Zweig somewhat off-puttingly put it.
Amid a babble of peoples and languages—one in which, as elsewhere at the time, gender roles were being redefined—Viennese thinking was driven by an urge to find universal forms of communication. It aimed to discover what people had in common behind the façade of social convention, “to show modern man his true face”, in the words of Otto Wagner, an architect. Out of this came some of the most important intellectual schools of the 20th century, as well as the influential, and often highly eccentric, characters who went with it. These included one Sigmund Freud, who developed psychoanalysis in Vienna, in order to expose the common archetypes of the unconscious.
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” remains the most famous text of Viennese philosophy. The pioneering logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, dominated by Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap (both originally from Germany) was probably of greater influence, setting the scene for modern analytical philosophy with its strong affinity for the sciences. The most accomplished of the circle was Otto Neurath. On top of his philosophy, he revolutionised the transmission of knowledge with new ways of translating complex information into simple, graphic pictograms: to make knowledge accessible was to make it democratic. All sorts of formats for data visualisation in use today can be traced back to these “Isotypes” (example on next page).
The Viennese school also pushed into new fields, such as, famously, sex. Before Freud, there was Richard Krafft-Ebbing, who studied in Graz before coming to Vienna and in 1886 published “Psychopathia Sexualis,” the first attempt to apply some rigorous methodology to the study of sexuality. He drew on court cases to analyse homosexuality and bisexuality (albeit often in Latin). His work popularised the terms sadism and masochism. (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, eponym to the latter and author of “Venus in Furs,” though a subject of the emperor, was not Viennese.)
It was partly the emperor himself who opened the way to modern sensibilities. Ultra-conservative in taste he may have been, but Franz Joseph’s duty was to all the peoples of his empire, and he tried to guarantee the freedoms—of movement, of religion, of the press and of equal rights—that the liberal constitution of 1867 enshrined. So Europe’s crustiest old monarchy often supported some of the most avant-garde artistic projects of the day, such as the Vienna Secession movement of 1897, in the interests of strengthening the universal language of art and architecture that might unite the empire. Secession artists were engaged to design the empire’s postage stamps and currency. The emperor might have drawn his curtains against the Looshaus, but he let it be built.

Anschluss and after

The tensions and collisions so fruitful to the cultural life of its capital were less salutary for the empire as a whole. Assailed by the rising forces of nationalism, particularly pan-Germanism, the cosmopolitan state began to crumble. The influx of peoples to Vienna provoked increasing resentment among the German working class; immigrant Czechs in particular proved willing to work for less money in worse conditions. At the same time Czech, Serbian and other nationalists increasingly agitated for independence.
Jews, as the supranational people of the multi-ethnic state, readily became the target of every nationalist enemy of the empire. Georg Schoenerer, son of a successful Viennese industrialist, was the first to turn anti-Semitism into a political programme, denouncing the “sucking vampires” who knocked at the “narrow-windowed house of the German farmer and craftsmen”. Unemployment, rising prices and a lack of housing in Vienna fuelled the anger of many Germans after 1900, leading to frequent riots and violent attacks on other nationalities. Karl Lueger channelled Schoenerer’s anti-Semitism into a political movement, campaigning to be mayor on the slogan “Vienna is German and must remain German”. His explicit rejection of the multi-ethnic character of Vienna brought him into direct conflict with the emperor. Lueger won a majority on the city council to elect him mayor in 1895, but for two years Franz Joseph nobly refused to appoint him because of his anti-Semitism. Eventually, in 1897, Franz Joseph bowed to popular pressure, and Lueger ruled the city until 1910.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I: Gustav Klimt

That, essentially, was the beginning of the end of liberal Vienna. After the war and the end of the monarchy there was a brief flourishing of progressive social democracy in the city, the era of “Red Vienna”. But all the time, in the new, truncated republic of Austria the more conservative provinces slowly tightened their grip on the country. In 1933 Engelbert Dolfuss seized power in the name of Austrofascism, which gave way to Nazi fascism in 1938 with the Anschluss. Hitler, who moved to Vienna from Linz in upper Austria, had been transfixed by Schoenerer and, particularly, Lueger. He hungrily absorbed all his hero’s complaints about the Jews and the mixing of “races”; he called the Viennese a “repulsive bunch”. Thus liberal Vienna had produced its exact opposite: militant nationalism and anti-Semitism. During the interwar years these forces gradually took hold of the new Austria and from the 1920s onwards many began to flee abroad. One of the last out, in 1938, was Freud.
 Most of the exiles went to Britain and America, where they were often gratefully received. The most valuable aspect of Viennese thinking for the West at the time was the application of up-to-date “scientific” methods to fields that had previously been left to amateur theorising, or that had been altogether neglected. This transformed many aspects of life.

The Viennese tended to be more persuasive than the intellectual competition

Take the work of Charlotte Buehler, a pioneer in child psychology. She was born in Berlin to Jewish parents, but moved to Vienna, together with her husband Karl, in 1922. At the University of Vienna, through painstaking direct observation, the Buehlers worked out their influential response-testing techniques: ways to calibrate a child’s development, through the accomplishment of gradually more complex tasks. These tests are, in effect, still in use today. By six months, an infant should be able to distinguish between a bottle and a rubber doll. At 18 months, he or she was expected to respond to the order “No”.
Often the Viennese intellectuals leapt ahead by transferring knowledge gained in one discipline to others, gloriously indifferent to the mind-forged manacles that have come to stifle modern academia and research. In America, several Viennese-trained devotees of Freud used the tools of psychoanalysis to revolutionise business. Ernest Dichter, author of “The Strategy of Desire,” transformed the fortunes of companies through marketing that purposely tapped into consumers’ subliminal desires.
Another example was Paul Lazarsfeld, the founder of modern American sociology. Born of Jewish parents, he studied maths in Vienna, completing his doctorate on Einstein’s gravitational theory, and thereafter applied his expertise in data and quantitative methods to what became known as opinion, or market research—finding out what people really feel about anything from television programmes to presidential candidates. In Vienna in 1931 he conducted the first scientific survey of radio listeners, and also co-wrote a revolutionary study of the devastating social and psychological impacts of unemployment. His team of investigators conducted what is now called “field research”, meticulously recording the results of face-to-face interviews with laid-off factory workers in the town of Marienthal.
Moving to America in 1933, Lazarsfeld went on to found the Columbia University Bureau for Social Research. His team was the first to use focus groups, developed with Dichter, his one-time student, and statistical analysis to delve into the mysteries of voter and consumer preferences or the impact of the emerging mass media. Lazarsfeld and others thus helped revivify moribund, antiquarian modes of inquiry, and re-equip them with the latest Viennese techniques, often saving entire Western intellectual traditions from decrepitude, or possibly extinction.

Pilgrims on the mountain

Of no field was this truer than political economy, where the “Austrian school” of men like Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek strongly influenced the revival of liberalism and conservatism in the West after the second world war. These three were all quintessential products of late Habsburg Vienna. They were born in very different parts of the empire: von Mises of Jewish parents in Galicia (now Ukraine); Schumpeter of Catholic German-speaking parents in Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic; and Hayek in Vienna itself. Yet they were all schooled in the same liberal intellectual discipline.
Von Mises and Hayek, one of his students, saw earlier than most that by the interwar years the liberal era in Europe was being overwhelmed by the collectivism and totalitarianism of the right and the left. They subsequently devoted their lives to reversing the tide. Hayek, like the best of Vienna’s intellectuals, combined technical expertise in economics with a wide breadth of inquiry; as well as economics, he published on law, sociology and more. His greatest contribution was to restore intellectual rigour to the free-market school, expositing in detail the “price mechanism” to show that socialist economics could not possibly work in theory, let alone practice.
But Hayek was not just a dry theorist. He was also a relentless circus-master for the liberal cause. Emigrating to Britain in 1931, he was the author of the first call to arms for the liberal fightback, “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944. This was provocatively dedicated to the “Socialists of all Parties”, implying that at the end of the second world war all Britain’s political parties, including Winston Churchill’s Conservatives, had drifted into collectivism by advocating the welfare state.
To organise the fightback he founded the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) in 1947. Named after the Swiss mountain where the first meeting was held (simply because the founding members couldn’t agree on a more appropriate alternative), the MPS was Hayek’s own Circle for liberalism. It fused the Viennese liberals in exile, including Karl Popper, who had just published The Open Society and its Enemies, with their embattled fellow-travellers from Germany, France, Britain and America, most notably Milton Friedman. Over the next decades the MPS spawned scores of think-tanks around the world dedicated to spreading the word of the Austrian school. Politicians often attended their meetings. The “Chicago school” of economists was made up largely of MPS members. After decades of quiet campaigning, Hayek’s ideas were taken up again by a subsequent generation of politicians in the mid-1970s, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
The consensus on free markets and democracy won in the 1980s remained intact for decades—a tribute, in part, to the intellectual efforts of Franz Joseph’s Viennese. It also provides a clue as to why they have been so influential in the West. The Viennese school placed the lived experience of individuals—rather than the abstractions of class, race and nationalism favoured by their opponents—at the heart of their intellectual enterprises. Thus the empirical research of a Buehler or a Lazarsfeld tended to work with the “the crooked timber of humanity”, as Immanuel Kant put it, rather than trying to straighten it out, as Marxists, fascists and all systematisers try to do. After a lecture by John Maynard Keynes, always the systematiser, Vienna-born Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management theory, saw the distinction in clear relief: “I suddenly realised that Keynes and all the brilliant economic students in the room were interested in the behaviour of commodities, while I was interested in the behaviour of people.”

For this reason alone, the Viennese tended to be more persuasive than their competitors. Furthermore, the stress on the individual also chimed with the exigencies of an exhausted West taking on the Soviet Union in the cold war after 1947. The Viennese émigrés were vital in sharpening the intellectual and cultural claims of liberal democracy at a time when many young people in the West had deserted to more fashionable leftist causes. They were swiftly promoted to university posts and other influential positions by their Anglo-Saxon admirers. The Viennese could articulate a more convincing defence of freedom because they had direct personal experience of the totalitarian enemy.
However, the freedom that the Viennese espoused came at a price; self-expression could be accomplished only by intellectual rigour and self-discipline. Even at the time this was too much to bear for many of Vienna’s young, several of whom committed suicide as they fell short of their own high standards—three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brothers took their own lives. Today, if this year’s elections are any guide, politicians and demagogues seem content to wrap themselves in the language of freedom while abandoning any obligations to intellectual rigour or self-discipline. The Viennese century has ended. Its legacy is fraying.

Minha vida de koala - Paulo Roberto de Almeida (2004)

A "descoberta" desta foto na internet, totalmente por acaso, me fez lembrar de um antigo texto que fiz, sobre um novo estilo de vida, tentando imitar esses simpáticos bichinhos:
1356. “Minha vida de koala: fábula fabulosa (à la manière de La Fontaine)”, Brasília, 19 nov. 2004, 3 p. Digressão ligeira sobre uma reencarnação ideal, a partir de uma ideia formulada em Washington, em 7/09/2003. Postado no blog Diplomatizzando (20/11/2011; link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2011/11/minha-vida-de-koala-um-texto-pra-jamais.html). 

Será que ainda se aplica?

Minha vida de koala

fábula fabulosa (à la manière de La Fontaine)

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

(www.pralmeida.org)

E se eu não fosse quem eu sou?

A pergunta faz sentido, sobretudo se colocada no contexto da herança deixada pelos “anos de chumbo”, nas décadas de 60 e 70, quando muitos opositores ao regime militar então em vigor tiveram de assumir outras identidades, de maneira a resguardar a segurança pessoal ou a dos familiares. Alguns aderiram à nova identidade e gostaram tanto da “personalidade alternativa” que preservaram a vida do alter ego mesmo depois de plenamente restabelecida a democracia no Brasil.

Não foi o meu caso, mas ainda assim a pergunta toca numa corda sensível, já que implica que eu poderia ter nascido sob outro nome, ter tido uma outra história de vida, ter sido uma pessoa completamente diferente daquela que se apresenta agora sob esta identidade de funcionário público e professor universitário, completamente desprovido desta aparência anódina de intelectual de gabinete. Eu bem que poderia ter sido, a despeito deste ar tranqüilo de “combatente da pluma”, um perigoso contraventor da lei e da ordem, um “subversivo” como então se dizia, um marxista enragé (e engagé) ou então um anarquista franco-atirador, tão ameaçador da saúde das instituições en place quanto o libertário radical que de fato eu sou atualmente. Tampouco foi o meu caso, mas caberia considerar seriamente a hipótese levantada acima, pelo menos teoricamente, e talvez até mesmo hipoteticamente, num terreno situado externamente à espécie humana.

Sim, vejamos: se eu não fosse este bípede leitor e escrevinhador, com este jeito de eternamente distraído e sempre absorto em alguma leitura atrasada, o que eu poderia ser? Ou melhor: o que eu gostaria de ser? Boa pergunta esta, mas a resposta já foi dada acima, assim que o resto da fábula não apresenta mais surpresas, apenas curiosidades.

Com efeito, considerando todas as possibilidades disponíveis no reino animal – não, eu não estava considerando nada nos reinos vegetal ou mineral – e as alternativas indicadas no caso de um cidadão pacato como este que vos fala e escreve, fiquei bastante tentado a, numa segunda (ou em qualquer outra) encarnação de vida, formular ao todo poderoso senhor criador de todas as coisas meu desejo de voltar ao mundo como koala. Pausa para explicar essa do “criador”, num texto de um “materialista vulgar”, ou pelo menos um “irreligioso” assumido. A justificativa é perfeitamente lógica: num exercício que se pretende de “reencarnação”, o mínimo que se poderia querer, como fiat inescapável, é a existência de um criador supremo, que fica brincando com a vida da gente, dando a um sapo a conformação de um príncipe, a uma barata a beleza de Nefertite ou a um fracote poderes de Napoleão (mas existem muitos concorrentes neste caso).

Pois bem, por que, exatamente, eu gostaria de ser esse estranho animal do tão distante continente australiano? Por algumas razões muito simples: aprendi que o koala passa 80% do seu tempo dormindo, 10% comendo e os 10% restantes apenas esperando a próxima refeição ou o próximo dodô (sitting-by, dizem os australianos). Para quem só passa 20% do seu tempo dormindo, essa perspectiva é verdadeiramente fabulosa, digna de algum La Fontaine do sono. Não sei se os koalas são todos funcionários públicos do Serviço Zoológico Nacional da Austrália, mas esse emploi du temps me parece bom para aposentados, preguiçosos ou hedonistas de maneira geral (o que eu ainda não sou, mas um dia chegarei lá). Trata-se de uma repartição de ocupações que melhor reflete um ideal de cultura zen, contemplativa, que não pode fazer nenhum tipo de mal à humanidade, à condição, obviamente, que se tenha de onde tirar o alimento.

Os ecologistas mais radicais por certo me apoiariam nessa reencarnação, pois eles estão sempre querendo nos fazer voltar ao equilíbrio da vida natural, distanciada da vida agitada da civilização e seus nefastos efeitos poluidores. Como isso não parece perto de ocorrer na minha vida terrena, vejamos como eu poderia organizar minha vida para me aproximar daquela distribuição fabulosa de tempo, desde que invertendo, está claro, a repartição de tarefas para melhor refletir minhas prioridades de vida.

Atualmente, passo 60% do tempo trabalhando (no meu emprego assalariado e em tarefas acadêmicas auto-assumidas), 20% dormindo e o quinto restante numa variedade de ocupações familiares, locomotoras, alimentícias e duchísticas (sem esquecer a lista do supermercado). Não está mal, mas poderia estar melhor se eu tivesse um modo koala de ser. Vejamos como isso seria possível.

Eu acordaria às 11 horas da manhã, não precisaria ler as últimas notícias daquele chatérrimo jornal conservador do qual sou assinante, não correria para consultar e-mails, não teria, sobretudo, de sair correndo de casa para o trabalho, tentando demonstrar a mim mesmo que as muitas horas empregadas durante a noite em leituras sonolentas e em navegações na internet são de fato “úteis” para aquele novo trabalho que pretendo terminar ainda nesta manhã (hélàs, ainda não foi desta vez). Não precisaria mais usar gravata nem paletó e poderia sair de casa sem lenço e sem documento.

Ou melhor: eu não sairia, eu ficaria. Eu simplesmente desceria lentamente do meu galho-cama para o galho-cozinha, me serviria de algumas folhas de eucalipto e, voilà, já teria ganhado metade do meu dia. A caminho (lentamente) do galho-biblioteca, eu daria um bom-dia à patroa e às crianças, não teria de me ocupar do horário da escola, do dever de casa, das compras de supermercado, da arrumação da mesa da sala, da retirada de jornais do dia anterior e, sobretudo, de lavar a louça das refeições. Em muito menos tempo do que se emprega para dizer saperlipopette, eu teria alisado os pêlos, lambido os beiços do resto de suco de eucalipto e estaria pronto para me dedicar ao esporte favorito de todo koala: dormir (não sei quando eles arrumam tempo para a reprodução da espécie).

Mas, alto lá: eu sou um koala diferente. Nasci e me criei no galho-biblioteca, para onde devo ter sido arrastado por alguma lufada dos bons ventos australianos. Desde então me acostumei a dormir no meio dos livros, a caminhar lendo livros, a sonhar com livros e a me imaginar vivendo uma vida só de leituras e de resenhas de livros. Ainda vou fazer isso e talvez nem precise de uma outra encarnação; esta mesma daria conta do recado. Só preciso de um orçamento do tamanho do da Library of Congress, de uma boa rede à sombra das palmeiras, de um estoque de água mineral com gás, de um laptop wireless dotado de dictavoice e de uma assinatura da The New York Review of Books. O resto é supérfluo, inclusive as palmeiras (na verdade detesto exibicionismos).

Ainda vou fazer isso, ainda que possa demorar mais um pouco: só me falta aprender a gostar de folhas de eucalipto (que devem ser horríveis…).

Moral da história: você não precisa deixar de ser quem você é, para fazer aquilo que mais lhe dá prazer na vida: basta um pouco de imaginação e paciência de koala…

Washington, 7 de setembro de 2003.

Brasília, 19 de novembro de 2004.

Reemergencia do liberealismo no século XXI? - Ralph Raico (FEE, 26/12/2016)

Liberalism's 20th Century Rebirth

Ralph Raico

Foundation for Economic Education, Monday, December 26, 2016

The First World War was the watershed of the twentieth century. Itself the product of antiliberal ideas and policies, such as militarism and protectionism, the Great War fostered statism in every form. In Europe and America, the trend towards state intervention accelerated, as governments conscripted, censored, inflated, ran up mountains of debts, co-opted business and labor, and seized control of the economy. Everywhere “progressive” intellectuals saw their dreams coming true. Thee old laissez-faire liberalism was dead, they gloated, and the future belonged to collectivism. The only question seemed to be: which kind of collectivism?

Bismarck won out, and the welfare state was eventually copied everywhere in Europe.

In Russia, the chaos of the war permitted a small group of Marxist revolutionaries to grab power and establish a field headquarters for world revolution. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx had concocted a secular religion with a potent appeal. It held out the promise of the final liberation of man through replacing the complex, often baffling world of the market economy by conscious, “scientific” control. Put into practice by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, the Marxist economic experiment resulted in catastrophe. For the next seventy years, Red rulers lurched from one patchwork expedient to another. But terror kept them firmly in charge, and the most colossal propaganda effort in history convinced intellectuals both in the West and in the emerging Third World that communism was, indeed, “the radiant future of all mankind.”

The peace treaties cobbled together by President Woodrow Wilson and the other Allied leaders left Europe a seething cauldron of resentment and hate. Seduced by nationalist demagogues and terrified of the Communist threat, millions of Europeans turned to the forms of state worship called Fascism and National Socialism, or Nazism. Though riddled with economic error, these doctrines promised prosperity and national power through integral state control of society, while fomenting more and greater wars.

The Rise of the Welfare State

In the democratic countries, milder forms of statism were the rule. Most insidious of all was the form that had been invented in the 1880s, in Germany. There Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, devised a series of old-age, disability, accident, and sickness insurance schemes, run by the state. The German liberals of the time argued that such plans were simply a reversion to the paternalism of the absolutist monarchies. Bismarck won out, and his invention — the welfare state — was eventually copied everywhere in Europe, including the totalitarian countries. With the New Deal, the welfare state came to America.

Still, private property and free exchange continued as the basic organizing principles of Western economies. Competition, the profit motive, the steady accumulation of capital (including human capital), free trade, the perfecting of markets, increased specialization — all worked to promote efficiency and technical progress and with them higher living standards for the people. So powerful and resilient did this capitalist engine of productivity prove to be that widespread state intervention, coercive labor-unionism, even government-generated depressions and wars could not check economic growth in the long run.

Mises demonstrated that economic calculation without private property was impossible.

The 1920s and ’30s represent the nadir of the classical-liberal movement in this century. Especially after government meddling with the monetary system led to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, dominant opinion held that history had closed the books on competitive capitalism, and with it the liberal philosophy.

If a date were to be put on the rebirth of classical liberalism, it would be 1922, the year of the publication of Socialism, by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. One of the most remarkable thinkers of the century, Mises was also a man of unflinching courage. In Socialism, he threw down the gauntlet to the enemies of capitalism. In effect, he said: “You accuse the system of private property of causing all social evils, which only socialism can cure. Fine. But would you now kindly do something you have never deigned to do before: would you explain how a complex economic system will be able to operate in the absence of markets, and hence prices, for capital goods?” Mises demonstrated that economic calculation without private property was impossible, and exposed socialism for the passionate illusion it was.

Mises’s challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy opened the minds of thinkers in Europe and America. F.A. Hayek, Wilhelm Roepke, and Lionel Robbins were among those whom Mises converted to the free market. And, throughout his very long career, Mises elaborated and reformed his economic theory and social philosophy, becoming the acknowledged premier classical-liberal thinker of the twentieth century.

The "Old Right"

In Europe and particularly in the United States, scattered individuals and groups kept something of the old liberalism alive. At the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago, academics could be found, even in the 1930s and ’40s, who defended at least the basic validity of the free-enterprise idea. In America, an embattled brigade of brilliant writers, mainly journalists, survived. Now known as the “Old Right,” they included Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorov, H. L. Mencken, Felix Morley, and John T. Flynn. Spurred to action by the totalitarian implications of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, these writers reiterated the traditional American creed of individual freedom and scornful distrust of government. They were equally opposed to Roosevelt’s policy of global meddling as subversive of the American Republic. Supported by a few courageous publishers and businessmen, the “Old Right” nursed the flame of Jeffersonian ideals through the darkest days of the New Deal and the Second World War.

With the end of that war, what can be called a movement came into being. Small at first, it was fed by multiplying streams. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, alerted many thousands to the reality that, in pursuing socialist policies, the West was risking the loss of its traditional free civilization. In 1946, Leonard Read established The Foundation for Economic Education, in Irvington, New York, publishing the works of Henry Hazlitt and other champions of the free market. Mises and Hayek, now both in the United States, continued their work. Hayek led in founding the Mont Pelerin Society, a group of classical-liberal scholars, activists, and businessmen from all over the world.

Millions of Americans in all walks of life had all along quietly cherished the values of the free market, and private property.

Mises, unsurpassed as a teacher, set up a seminar at New York University, attracting such students as Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner. Rothbard went on to wed the insights of Austrian economics to the teachings of natural law to produce a powerful synthesis that appealed to many of the young. At the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Aaron Director led a group of classical-liberal economists whose specialty was exposing the defects of government action. The gifted novelist Ayn Rand incorporated emphatically libertarian themes in her well-crafted best-sellers, and even founded a school of philosophy.

Predictable Hostility

The reaction to the renewal of authentic liberalism on the part of the left — “liberal” — more accurately, social-democrat-establishment was predictable, and ferocious. In 1954, for instance, Hayek edited a volume entitled Capitalism and the Historians, a collection of essays by distinguished scholars arguing against the prevailing socialist interpretation of the Industrial Revolution. A scholarly journal permitted Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Harvard professor and New Deal hack, to savage the book in these terms: “Americans have enough trouble with home-grown McCarthys without importing Viennese professors to add academic luster to the process.”

Other works the establishment tried to kill by silence. As late as 1962, not a single prominent magazine or newspaper chose to review Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Still, the writers and activists who led the revival of classical liberalism found a growing resonance among the public. Millions of Americans in all walks of life had all along quietly cherished the values of the free market, and private property. The growing presence of a solid corps of intellectual leaders now gave many of these citizens the heart to stand up for the ideas they had held dear for so long.

In the 1970s and ’80s, with the evident failure of socialist planning and interventionist programs, classical liberalism became a world-wide movement. In Western countries, and then, incredibly, in the nations of the former Warsaw Pact, political leaders even declared themselves disciples of Hayek and Friedman. As the end of the century approached, the old, authentic liberalism was alive and well, stronger than it had been for a hundred years.

And yet, in Western countries, the state keeps on relentlessly expanding, colonizing one area of social life after the other. In America, the Republic is fast becoming a fading memory, as federal bureaucrats and global planners divert more and more power to the center. So the struggle continues, as it must. Two centuries ago, when liberalism was young, Jefferson had already informed us of the price of liberty.

Excerpted from The Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of Classical Liberalism

Ralph Raico

Ralph Raico (1936-2016) was an American libertarian historian of European liberalism. He was formerly a professor of history at Buffalo

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Ascensao, decinio e renascimento (?) do liberalismo - Ralph Raico (FEE)

When Liberalism Went Into Retreat

Ralph Raico

Foundation for Economic Education, Monday, December 26, 2016

https://fee.org/articles/when-liberalism-went-into-retreat/?utm_medium=push&utm_source=push_notification

As the nineteenth century began, classical liberalism — or just liberalism as the philosophy of freedom was then known — was the specter haunting Europe — and the world. In every advanced country the liberal movement was active.

Drawn mainly from the middle classes, it included people from widely contrasting religious and philosophical backgrounds. Christians, Jews, deists, agnostics, utilitarians, believers in natural rights, freethinkers, and traditionalists all found it possible to work towards one fundamental goal: expanding the area of the free functioning of society and diminishing the area of coercion and the state.

Emphases varied with the circumstances of different countries. Sometimes, as in Central and Eastern Europe, the liberals demanded the rollback of the absolutist state and even the residues of feudalism. Accordingly, the struggle centered around full private property rights in land, religious liberty, and the abolition of serfdom. In Western Europe, the liberals often had to fight for free trade, full freedom of the press, and the rule of law as sovereign over state functionaries.

In America, the liberal country par excellence, the chief aim was to fend off incursions of government power pushed by Alexander Hamilton and his centralizing successors, and, eventually, somehow, to deal with the great stain on American freedom — Negro slavery.

From the standpoint of liberalism, the United States was remarkably lucky from the start. Its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, was composed by Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading liberal thinkers of his time. The Declaration radiated the vision of society as consisting of individuals enjoying their natural rights and pursuing their self-determined goals. In the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Founders created a system where power would be divided, limited, and hemmed in by multiple constraints, while individuals went about the quest for fulfillment through work, family, friends, self-cultivation, and the dense network of voluntary associations. In this new land, government — as European travelers noted with awe — could hardly be said to exist at all. This was the America that became a model to the world.

One perpetuator of the Jeffersonian tradition in the early 19th century was William Leggett, a New York journalist and antislavery Jacksonian Democrat. Leggett declared:

“All governments are instituted for the protection of person and property; and the people only delegate to their rulers such powers as are indispensable to these objects. The people want no government to regulate their private concerns, or to prescribe the course and mete out the profits of their industry. Protect their persons and property, and all the rest they can do for themselves.”

This laissez-faire philosophy became the bedrock creed of countless Americans of all classes. In the generations to come, it found an echo in the work of liberal writers like R L. Godkin, Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov, and Leonard Read. To the rest of the world, this was the distinctively, characteristically American outlook.

Meanwhile, the economic advance that had been slowly gaining momentum in the Western world burst out in a great leap forward. First in Britain, then in America and Western Europe, the Industrial Revolution transformed the life of man as nothing had since the neolithic age. Now it became possible for the vast majority of mankind to escape the immemorial misery they had grown to accept as their unalterable lot. Now tens of millions who would have perished in the inefficient economy of the old order were able to survive. As the populations of Europe and America swelled to unprecedented levels, the new masses gradually achieved living standards unimaginable for working people before.

The birth of the industrial order was accompanied by economic dislocations. How could it have been otherwise? The free-market economists preached the solution: security of property and hard money to encourage capital formation, free trade to maximize efficiency in production, and a clear field for entrepreneurs eager to innovate. But conservatives, threatened in their age-old status, initiated a literary assault on the new system, giving the Industrial Revolution a bad name from which it never fully recovered. Soon the attack was gleefully taken up by groups of socialist intellectuals that began to emerge.

Still, by mid-century the liberals went from one victory to another. Constitutions with guarantees of basic rights were adopted, legal systems firmly anchoring the rule of law and property rights were put in place, and free trade was spreading, giving birth to a world economy based on the gold standard.

There were advances on the intellectual front as well. After spearheading the campaign to abolish the English Corn Laws, Richard Cobden developed the theory of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries as a foundation for peace. Frederic Bastiat put the case for free trade, non-intervention, and peace in a classic form. Liberal historians like Thomas Macaulay and Augustin Thierry uncovered the roots of freedom in the West. Later in the century, the economic theory of the free market was placed on a secure scientific footing with the rise of the Austrian School, inaugurated by Carl Menger.

The relation of liberalism and religion presented a special problem. In continental Europe and Latin America, freethinking liberals sometimes used the state power to curtail the influence of the Catholic Church, while some Catholic leaders clung to obsolete ideas of theocratic control. But liberal thinkers like Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Lord Acton saw beyond such futile disputes. They stressed the crucial role that religion, separated from government power, could play in stemming the growth of the centralized state. In this way, they prepared the ground for the reconciliation of liberty and religious faith.

Then, for reasons still unclear, the tide began to turn against the liberals. Part of the reason is surely the rise of the new class of intellectuals that proliferated everywhere. That they owed their very existence to the wealth generated by the capitalist system did not prevent most of them from incessantly gnawing away at capitalism, indicting it for every problem they could point to in modern society.

At the same time, voluntary solutions to these problems were preempted by state functionaries anxious to expand their domain. The rise of democracy may well have contributed to liberalism’s decline by aggravating an age-old feature of politics: the scramble for special privilege. Businesses, labor unions, farmers, bureaucrats, and other interest groups vied for state privileges — and found intellectual demagogues to rationalize their depredations. The area of state control grew, at the expense, as William Graham Sumner pointed out, of “the forgotten man” — the quiet, productive individual who asks no favor of government and, through his work, keeps the whole system going.

By the end of the century, liberalism was being battered on all sides. Nationalists and imperialists condemned it for promoting an insipid peace instead of a virile and bracing belligerency among the nations. Socialists attacked it for upholding the “anarchical” free-market system instead of “scientific” central planning. Even church leaders disparaged liberalism for its alleged egotism and materialism. In America and Britain, social reformers around the dawn of the century conceived a particularly clever gambit. Anywhere else the supporters of state intervention and coercive labor-unionism would have been called “socialists” or “social democrats.” But since the English-speaking peoples appeared for some reason to have an aversion to those labels, they hijacked the term “liberal.”

Though they fought on to the end, a mood of despondency settled on the last of the great authentic liberals. When Herbert Spencer began writing in the 1840s, he had looked forward to an age of universal progress in which the coercive state apparatus would practically disappear. By 1884, Spencer could pen an essay entitled, “The Coming Slavery.” In 1898, William Graham Sumner, American Spencerian, free-trader, and gold-standard advocate, looked with dismay as America started on the road to imperialism and global entanglement in the Spanish-American War: he titled his response to that war, grimly, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”

Everywhere in Europe there was a reversion to the policies of the absolutist state, as government bureaucracies expanded. At the same time, jealous rivalries among the Great Powers led to a frenzied arms race and sharpened the threat of war. In 1914, a Serb assassin threw a spark onto the heaped-up animosity and suspicion, and the result was the most destructive war in history to that point. In 1917, an American president keen to create a New World Order led his country into the murderous conflict “War is the health of the state,” warned the radical writer Randolph Bourne. And so it proved to be. By the time the butchery ended, many believed that liberalism in its classical sense was dead.

Excerpted from The Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of Classical Liberalism.

Ralph Raico

Ralph Raico (1936-2016) was an American libertarian historian of European liberalism. He was formerly a professor of history at Buffalo State College.

Diplomacia presidencial para uma politica externa afirmativa - Michel Temer (OESP, 25/12/2016)

Depois de um pronunciamento da AGNU e de alguns discursos protocolares por ocasião de reuniões bilaterais ou plurilaterais, esta é a primeira declaração geral do chefe de Estado sobre a política externa do Brasil e sobre sua própria diplomacia, retomando em suas grandes linhas valores e princípios que sempre foram os de nossa postura internacional, sem os desvios e deformações partidárias, sectárias, ideológicas, do lulopetismo diplomático.

Viva! Retornamos ao leito normal de nossa diplomacia profissional, depois de 13,5 anos de vergonhas acumuladas em apoiar ditaduras e de colocar todo o Itamaraty a serviço de um megalomaníaco corrupto e de uma inepta desequilibrada.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

DIPLOMACIA

Uma diplomacia presidencial a serviço do Brasil / Artigo / *Michel Temer

O Estado de S. Paulo, 25/12/2016

Em pouco tempo não hesitamos em ocupar os espaços que cabem ao País na cena mundial       

Nossa política externa deve ajustar-se aos interesses e aos valores dos brasileiros. Não por mera preferência deste ou daquele governante, mas por imperativo da democracia. Essa é a premissa de nossa diplomacia presidencial, que pusemos a serviço da abertura de novas oportunidades para o Brasil.

Nas curtas e intensas viagens internacionais que fizemos nestes menos de quatro meses de governo efetivo, nossa prioridade não poderia ser outra a não ser resgatar a confiança no Brasil – confiança que se traduz em investimentos, crescimento e empregos. Em meio à grave crise que herdamos, tem sido essencial apresentar a agenda de reformas que estamos promovendo internamente. A diplomacia presidencial tem servido, antes de mais nada, para mostrar ao mundo que o Brasil passou a ter rumo.

Nossa diplomacia presidencial tem tido, ainda, outra prioridade: transmitir nossa mensagem de compromisso inegociável com a democracia. Compromisso que se expressa em nossa vocação para o diálogo e nosso apego ao Direito. Compromisso que advém de princípio basilar do Estado brasileiro: a defesa das liberdades e dos direitos humanos de todo indivíduo, sem qualquer distinção de natureza política, ideológica, étnica ou religiosa.

Como sinal do lugar de destaque da região em nossa política externa, minha primeira visita bilateral foi à Argentina; em seguida, estive no Paraguai. Temos consciência de que a prosperidade do Brasil está vinculada à prosperidade de nossos vizinhos – como disse o Barão do Rio Branco, o que a Nação brasileira ambiciona é “ser forte entre vizinhos grandes e fortes”.

A indicar a retomada da vocação verdadeiramente universalista de nossa diplomacia, visitei a China, os Estados Unidos, a Índia e, após 11 anos sem visitas presidenciais, o Japão. Foram duas visitas à Ásia, área mais dinâmica da economia global, em apenas dois meses. Participamos das Cúpulas do G-20 e do Brics, bem como da abertura da Assembleia-Geral das Nações Unidas. Nessas ocasiões, reuni-me com líderes de países os mais diversos, de todas as regiões: do Peru à África do Sul, da Espanha à Arábia Saudita, do Uruguai à Palestina, da Itália à Nigéria.

Pudemos expor a todos os nossos interlocutores – governos, analistas, investidores, empresários – o que estamos fazendo para vencer a recessão, voltar a crescer e criar empregos. Apresentamos as reformas com vistas ao reequilíbrio fiscal. Descrevemos os marcos regulatórios mais racionais e previsíveis que agora passam a vigorar no País. Destacamos nosso objetivo de maior presença nos fluxos internacionais de investimento e comércio. Ressaltamos o vigoroso momento por que passam nossas instituições democráticas – momento de renovadas demandas e de profundas transformações. Pudemos explicitar, enfim, que temos um norte claro. E junto a todos encontramos mais do que ouvidos atentos: encontramos grande receptividade e genuína confiança na capacidade do Brasil de reaver o caminho do desenvolvimento.

Apostamos no multilateralismo como melhor resposta para o isolacionismo e a intolerância. Nas Nações Unidas, renovamos nosso compromisso com os direitos dos refugiados e dos migrantes e expusemos nossas políticas nacionais de apoio a essas populações. Reafirmamos, também, nosso compromisso com o meio ambiente. Depositamos o instrumento de ratificação do Acordo de Paris, unindo o Brasil aos esforços globais de combate à mudança do clima. Eleitos pelos membros da ONU, voltamos ao Conselho de Direitos Humanos da organização. Num mundo que traz as marcas da incerteza e da instabilidade, contribuímos para o diálogo e para a união de esforços.

Em Brasília, sediamos a Cúpula da Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa (CPLP) – seis dos quais são africanos. Recebemos sete chefes de Estado e de governo – e o Brasil esteve presente em nível presidencial pela primeira vez desde 2008. A CPLP, que o Brasil ajudou a criar há 20 anos e cuja presidência assumimos até 2018, é espaço natural de aproximação entre países que congregam 250 milhões de pessoas em quatro continentes: Américas, África, Europa e Ásia. A nosso convite, veio também para o encontro o novo secretário-geral da ONU, António Guterres, primeiro representante da lusofonia a liderar as Nações Unidas. Juntos, definimos agenda comum para o desenvolvimento sustentável nos países de língua portuguesa. Realizamos, também, a Cimeira Brasil-Portugal, encontro anual que não se reunia desde 2013. Revigoramos, dessa forma, uma de nossas mais tradicionais parcerias, porta de entrada do Brasil na Europa.

Antes, no Rio, tínhamos recebido, por ocasião dos Jogos Olímpicos e Paralímpicos, mais de 60 dignitários estrangeiros. Demos ao mundo mais uma mostra inequívoca da força de realização e de criação dos brasileiros.

Em pouco tempo de governo, não hesitamos em ocupar os espaços que cabem ao Brasil na cena internacional. Como, aliás, vêm fazendo o chanceler José Serra e o Itamaraty, que trabalham, com pragmatismo, em busca de oportunidades de cooperação e de soluções para nossos problemas. Exemplo concreto é a coordenação de medidas, com diferentes vizinhos, para o enfrentamento do crime organizado em nossas fronteiras.

Nada de visões de mundo enviesadas, que, de antemão, privilegiem certas categorias de países em detrimento de outras. A nossa é visão sem preconceitos e sem dogmatismos, que se orienta, ao contrário, pelas premências e pelos anseios da sociedade brasileira, à qual servimos.

Como afirmamos perante a Assembleia-Geral da ONU, assim continuaremos a levar adiante nossa atuação externa: com equilíbrio, mas com firmeza; com sobriedade, mas com determinação. Uma atuação externa com os pés no chão, mas com sede de mudança. Esobretudo, claro, com os olhos postos no Brasil e nos brasileiros.

*Presidente da República