Cold War ‘Peace’

Abstract

After being stripped of their Dynastic State intergenerational entitlement programme (1919), Hayek and Mises promoted the deflation that facilitated Hitler’s rise to power (1933–1945) and thus the expansion of the Soviet Empire into the heart of Europe (1945–1989). Partly in deference to their (criminally used) Second Estate titles, they then became the ‘theoreticians’ and heroes of the Cold War. One admirer—Henry Regnery—commissioned James Kilpatrick to write The Sovereign States Notes of a Citizen of Virginia (Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1957) which justified post-Brown versus Board of Education segregation on the grounds of the states’ ‘right of interposition’ (i.e. vetoing or nullifying) the 1954 Supreme Court ruling. The William Volker Fund underwrote bulk purchases of The Sovereign States to distribute, free of charge, to some 1200 college libraries and 260 private schools, and planned an educational outreach programme for ‘selected editors.’ At the Foundation for Economic Education—where Mises was the ‘spiritus rector’—Kilpatrick’s book was endorsed. Before the Kochs, the Volker Fund financed the Austrian revival, and Mises received the William Volker Distinguished Service Award. As the Vietnam War accelerated, Mises (Human Action a Treatise on Economics. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, p. 282, 1963; Human Action a Treatise on Economics. Henry Regnery, Chicago, p. 282, 1966), in the Regnery edition of Human Action, lobbied for conscription and the Warfare State: ‘He who in our age opposes armaments and conscription is, perhaps unbeknown to himself, an abettor of those aiming at the enslavement of all.’ Just before his Nobel Prize, Hayek explained that he regarded the Austrian School as an historical curiosity: ‘What we can hope for is just that this neoclassical tradition again becomes influential, not its specific Austrian branch which constitutes a particular phase in the neoclassical development.’ The Nobel Prize appeared to rescue Hayek from suicidal depression, and the threat to Koch Industries from the Environmental Protection Agency (Charles Koch’s ‘wallet’) appeared to rescue the Austrian School of Economics from irrelevance.