Perfect Capitalism, Imperfect Humans: Race, Migration and the Limits of Ludwig von Mises’s Globalism

While the Viennese origins of key neoliberal intellectuals is well known, the formative influence of the Habsburg Empire on their thought is surprisingly understudied. This article argues that the empire was a silent and open partner in the writings of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises on international order, especially on questions of migration and the management of a polyglot population. After 1918 Mises conceived of robust forms of multinational governance capable of protecting a world of what he called ‘perfect capitalism’ with total global mobility of labour, capital and commodities. Yet, by 1945 he had scaled back his proposals to the effective recreation of the Habsburg Empire. I show that Mises’s international theory was cleft by a faultline between a normative theory of an open borders world and the empirical reality of a closed borders world, underwritten by what he saw as the stubborn obstacles of human ignorance and racial animus.

Kokoro Confidential

As a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, Edwin McClellan (1925–2009) translated into English the most famous novel of modern Japan, Kokoro (1914), by Natsume Sōseki. This essay tells the story of how the translation emerged from and appealed to a nascent neoliberal movement that was led by Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), the Austrian economist who had been McClellan’s dissertation advisor.

Emil Sax and Italy. Three episodes

The paper deals with the historical reconstruction of the relation between the Austrian economist Emil Sax and the Italian economists of his generation. It is focused on three episodes. The first concerns the introduction of marginal analysis in public finance, seeing the works of Maffeo Pantaleoni (1883) and Sax (1887) as of primary significance. The second is about the reception accorded to the 1887 Sax's work in Italy by Giuseppe Ricca-Salerno (1887), and by Augusto Graziani (1887). The third relates to the development of a pure theory of public finance, and concerns the works of Sax (1887) and Antonio De Viti De Marco (1888). This analysis indicates that school rivalries were responsible for the different reactions of Italian economists to Sax's work.