Classical Liberalism

This synarchist agenda in the United States adopted a deceptive strategy of creating the Christian Right, to hide its fascist principles of libertarianism or neoliberalism with cloak of Christianity. American conservatives have repeatedly attempted to counteract the secular tradition of the United States, insisting that the country is a Christian nation, enshrined in its motto: “In God We Trust.” The truth is, the motto was not instituted by the Founding Fathers, but by the Eisenhower administration in 1953. One of its purposes was to deceptively adopt the language of Christianity in opposition to “Godless communism.” Its true use, however, as explained by Kevin Kruse, in One Nation Under God: How Corporate American Invented Christian America, was to shroud the attacks of corporate greed against the New Deal. “As men of God,” explains Kruse, “they could give voice to the same conservative complaints as business leaders, but without any suspicion that they were motivated solely by self-interest.”[1]

The great socialist experiment of modern times was the New Deal, a series of federal programs, public work projects, financial reforms and regulations enacted in the United States during the 1930s in response to the Great Depression. Some of these federal programs included the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). These programs included support for farmers, the unemployed, youth and the elderly as well as new constraints and safeguards on the banking industry and changes to the monetary system.

Neoliberalism is well known for its denunciations of state interference in the economy and the establishment of social programs. However, as demonstrated by Quinn Slobodian in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, the goals of the neoliberals was not to eliminate the state, but to subjugate it instead to systems of global governance. The neoliberals followed a dichotomy devised by Carl Schmitt—who in his 1950 book, The Nomos of the Earth—described the division of the world between two models, one where states govern over prescribed geographical areas, which he called the world of imperium, and a global economy, that transcends borders, which he referred to as the world of dominium. While Schmitt criticized the dichotomy, leading neoliberal thinker Wilhelm Röpke praised it.

For the neoliberals, state restrictions on trade should be removed to enable this global economy. In a lecture he delivered at the Academy of International Law at The Hague in 1955, Röpke emphasized the importance of the division while also pointing to its paradox. “To diminish national sovereignty is most emphatically one of the urgent needs of our time,” he argued, but “the excess of sovereignty should be abolished instead of being transferred to a higher political and geographical unit.”[2] As explained by Slobodian, “What neoliberals seek is not a partial but a complete protection of private capital rights, and the ability of supranational judiciary bodies like the European Court of Justice and the WTO to override national legislation that might disrupt the global rights of capital.”[3]

In contradistinction to the charity and compassion preached by Christianity, Neoliberalism is the economics of corporate greed, justified by a Social Darwinism that believes the economically disadvantaged are responsible for their own misery. Therefore, neoliberalism is about lobbying for government policies that limit taxes and regulations against corporate activities, but packaged for the masses, who should normally be opposed to policies that would otherwise put them at a disadvantage, as a global showdown between “democracy” and “communism.” In reality, neoliberalism is the “corporatist” economic philosophy of fascism. As explained by Roderick T. Long in “Liberalism vs. Fascism”:

… fascism seeks to incorporate or co-opt private ownership into the state apparatus through public-private partnership. Thus fascism tends to be more tempting than Communism to wealthy interests who may see it as a way to insulate their economic power from competition through forced cartelization and other corporatist stratagems.[4]

Neoliberalism stems from classical liberalism. There are essentially two aspects to conservatism: there is economic conservatism, and social conservatism. Economic conservatism is essentially the same as classical liberalism, to be distinguished from modern liberalism. Modern liberalism, or social liberalism, emphasizes social liberties and human rights, and values currently more commonly associated with the Left, such as the belief that the legitimate role of the government is to address economic and social issues such as poverty, health care and education. Neoconservatives are concerned with classical liberalism, which advocates for the protection of personal liberties and from government intervention through limited taxation and regulation or corporate activity.

In other words, classical liberalism is concerned rather with liberties for the moneyed class, with the corresponding belief that individuals should be held responsible for themselves, and not be provided assistance by the government. Notable individuals whose ideas have contributed to classical liberalism include John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. Classical liberalism also drew on utilitarianism, natural law, progress and the economics of Adam Smith, who proposed the rationalization that government intervention in the economy was not necessary, because if the capitalist class were afforded unfettered opportunity to accumulate wealth, an “invisible hand” would ensure fair redistribution.

Geneva School

The four cities that are usually considered the birthplaces of neoliberalism are Vienna, London, Chicago, and Freiburg. Slobodian has pointed out that an important place missing from the list is the Geneva School, of which Ludwig von Mises was an important exponent, who strongly influenced the American libertarian movement.[5] Von Mises, a friend and colleague of Otto von Habsburg, has been described as having approximately seventy close students in Austria, and the Austrians as the insiders of the Chicago school of economics, at the Rockefeller-funded University of Chicago.[6] Von Mises was chief economist for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce and was an economic adviser of Engelbert Dollfuss, the austrofascist but strongly anti-Nazi Austrian Chancellor. Later he was economic adviser to Otto von Habsburg, and a member of Coudenhove-Kalgergi’s PEU.[7] Von Mises initiated the “socialist calculation debate,” eventually positioning neoliberal economics as the most important intellectual opposition to socialism.

In the inter-war period, von Mises was secretary of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and organizer of one of the most prominent Privatseminars, which included Friedrich Hayek and Fritz Machlup, and attracted many foreign scholars, such as Lionel Robbins, Frank Knight, and John van Sickle, who would become key members of the Mont Pelerin Society. At that time, von Mises and Hayek earned their money at a research institute funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to supply economic data to Austrian firms.[8] In 1940 von Mises and his wife fled the German advance in Europe and emigrated to New York City under a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation.[9]

In the US, von Mises befriended Ayn Rand, whose works he admired. Rand has been a significant influence among libertarians and American conservatives.[10] She was the author of two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which were based on her philosophy known as Objectivism, which supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected altruism. Rand considered laissez-faire capitalism the only moral social system because in her view it was the only system based on the protection of one’s right to guard one’s own selfish interest. She opposed statism, which she understood to include theocracy, absolute monarchy, Nazism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, and dictatorship. Von Mises declared:

…Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. It is also (or may I say: first of all) a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society, a substantiated rejection of the ideology of our self-styled “intellectuals” and a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and political parties… You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the efforts of men who are better than you.[11]

For all her claims about the need to remain “rational,” Rand was an emotionally-stunted woman who convinced her disciple, Barbara Branden, to allow her to have an affair with her husband Nathaniel, who was half her age. When he fell in love with another woman, Rand was enraged, accused him of being “irrational” and then tried to destroy his career. When Barbara pleaded with her to show compassion, Rand’s answer was, “why?”[12]

Volker Fund 

“In addition to being staunch opponents of war and militarism,” wrote von Mises’ protégé Murray Rothbard, “the Old Right of the postwar period had a rugged and near-libertarian honesty in domestic affairs as well.”[13] According to Rothbard, “A new and vital turning point in the postwar libertarian movement was the emergence of the Volker Fund program.”[14] The William Volker Fund, which was founded in 1932 by businessman and home-furnishings mogul William Volker, was instrumental in bringing Friedrich Hayek to the University of Chicago, and also helped support many other classical liberal scholars who at the time could not obtain positions in American universities, such as Hayek and von Mises.[15]

Many of the individuals who supported by the Volker Fund saw themselves as a “remnant,” a term from Isaiah, coined by Albert Jay Nock to refer to anti-statists who resisted the nation’s adherence to the socialism of the New Deal Era.[16] Nock’s best known book was Our Enemy, the State. Published in 1935, it attempts to analyze the origins of American freedom, as well as questioning the nature and legitimacy of authoritarian government. Nock argues, further, that the Articles of Confederation that preceded the US Constitution were actually superior to it, and that the reasons given for its replacement were excuses by land speculators and creditors looking to enrich themselves. Nock cites Thomas Paine as pointing out that the state “even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” He quotes Freud as noting that government does not actually show any tendency to suppress crime, but only to protect its own monopoly over it. The book has been cited as an influence by a wide range of thinkers and political figures, including H.L. Mencken, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater.

H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock were the first prominent figures in the United States to describe themselves as libertarians, believing that Franklin D. Roosevelt had co-opted the word “liberal” for his New Deal policies which they opposed and used “libertarian” to signify their allegiance to individualism. Mencken, known as the “Sage of Baltimore,” was an admirer of Nietzsche, and a critic of religion, populism and representative democracy, which he believed was a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.[17] Mencken and drama critic George Jean Nathan founded The American Mercury magazine in 1924. The magazine featured writing by some of the most important American writers from the 1920s to the 1930s, publishing the writings of Clarence Darrow, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Sinclair Lewis and Albert Jay Nock. After a change in ownership in the 1940s, the magazine attracted conservative writers. The American Mercury featured articles by Henry Hazlitt, Frank Chodorov, Reverend Billy Graham and J. Edgar Hoover, James Burnham, and William F. Buckley, Jr., who worked for the publication as a young staffer.[18] Chodorov, who also funded by the Volker Fund, was born a Jew but hid it until late in life.[19]

Serving as a “senior analyst” for the Volker Fund was Murray Rothbard, the person most responsible for popularizing the term “libertarian,” who started publishing libertarian works in the 1960s.[20] Rothbard, who was born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Poland, considered himself part of the Old Right as a young man. During the 1940s Rothbard became acquainted with Chodorov and read widely in libertarian-oriented works by Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, Isabel Paterson, H.L. Mencken and others, as well von Mises. Writing under the pseudonym “Aubrey Herbert,” Rothbard was titular Washington editor of Faith and Freedom, a title held earlier by Frank Chodorov.[21] In 1954 Rothbard, along with several other students of von Mises, joined the circle of Ayn Rand. The Volker Fund paid Rothbard to write a textbook to explain Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, von Mises’ magnum opus.[22] Luhnow approved the Volker Fund grant that enabled Rothbard to write Man, Economy and State.[23]

Volker hired AFC founder William H. Regnery to head Western Shade Cloth Company, which he eventually bought from him, and renamed Joanna Western Mills Company, which ultimately became the source of the family’s wealth.[24] William’s son Henry Regnery founded the conservative Regnery Publishing. According to E. Howard Hunt, the CIA subsidized Regnery Publishing because of its pro-Nazi stance.[25] After helping to found Human Events as a weekly newsletter in 1944, Regnery began publishing monthly pamphlets and books. Some of the first pamphlets he published included a speech by University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins, who criticized the harsh treatment of Germans and Japanese in postwar administration of the former Axis countries. It was Hutchins who had been responsible for bringing Leo Strauss to the university.

The first book published by Regnery was by Victor Gollancz, a socialist who ran the Left Book Club in Britain. Although Jewish, Gollancz published In Darkest Germany in Britain which was critical of the bombing of German civilians late in the war and of the treatment of the country afterward. Because his ideas were unpopular, Gollancz was unable to find an American publisher but Regnery agreed to publish it. Regnery’s third book was The Hitler in Our Selves by Max Picard. Other early books included The German Opposition to Hitler by the German nationalist Hans Rothfels and The High Cost of Vengeance (1949) by Freda Utley which was critical of the Allies’ air campaign and post-war occupation. Regnery Publishing, like the Volker Fund, also did its part to promote libertarian economics, publishing works of Hayek, Lugwig von Mises, Nock and Chodorov, who became editor of Human Events in 1951. Regnery also published paperback editions of literary works by authors such as novelist Wyndham Lewis and the poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In 1954, Regnery published Junio Valerio Borghese’s memoirs, Sea Devils.

Mont Pelerin Society

The Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947 by Hayek, Frank Knight, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman, was funded by the Volker Fund.[26] The term “neoliberalism” was coined at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, which inspired the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, a sister organization of Coudenhove-Kalgergi’s Pan-European Union, which included Otto von Habsburg. The society advocated the free-market principles set forth by the Lippmann Colloquium. After interest in classical liberalism had declined in the 1920s and 1930s, the aim was to construct a new Liberalism as a rejection of collectivism, socialism and laissez-faire liberalism. At the Colloquium, the term neoliberalism was coined by Alexander Rüstow referring to the rejection of the laissez-faire liberalism.[27]

The Lippmann Colloquium was a conference of intellectuals held in Paris in 1938, organized by French philosopher Louis Rougier. In 1934, the Rockefeller Foundation sent Rougier on a research trip on the situation of intellectuals in central Europe. He taught at the Frankfurt School’s New School for Social Research in New York from 1941–43. Rougier was initially refused membership in the Mont Pelerin Society because of his former association with the Vichy Regime. In 1940, Pétain had sent Rougier on a secret mission to London, and claimed to have brokered an agreement between Vichy and Churchill. Rougier was finally elected to the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1957 through the personal intervention of Friedrich von Hayek.[28]

Another former Vichy collaborator involved in the Colloquium was Alexandre Marc, who was involved in the European Movement. Marc was also the founder of Ordre Nouveau, linked with synarchists like Jean Coutrot, the purported author of the Synarchst Pact. With Denis de Rougemont of the the CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Marc had been a member of the Sohlberg Circle, founded by SS member Otto Abetz, who was German ambassador to Vich France. Abetz’ key disciples were Alfred Fabre-Luce and Bertand de Jouveval, who both subscribed to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s dream of a United Europe.[29] Israeli anti-fascist historian Zeev Sternhell published Neither Right nor Left, accusing De Jouvenel of fascist sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s. De Jouvenel sued in 1983, claiming nine counts of libel, two of which the court upheld. Jouvenel was supported by friends he knew from the post-war period: prominent names like Henry Kissinger, Milton Friedman and Raymond Aron, who co-founded Ordre Nouveau with Marc.[30] However, Sternhell was neither required to publish a retraction nor to strike any passages from future printings of his book.

After World War II, because of the excesses of fascism, the right had been largely discredited, and communism was gaining widespread popularity in Western Europe. Many considered the nationalization of industries as a positive direction. To counter these tendencies, Hayek derived his strategy from Carl Schmitt, to whom he openly acknowledged his debt. According to Hayek, “The conduct of Carl Schmitt under the Hitler regime does not alter the fact that, of the modern German writings on the subject, his are still among the most learned and perceptive.”[31] In Road to Serfdom, following Schmitt, Hayek characterized state intervention in the economy as tantamount to totalitarianism.[32] Hayek notes that the “flawed” conception of a welfare state “was very clearly seen by… Carl Schmitt, who in the 1920s probably understood the character of the developing form of [interventionist] government better than most people.”[33] Hayek therefore articulated the basis of neoliberal thought, which repudiated all forms of government involvement in economic affairs, calling for absolute free enterprise, deregulation of industry and the removal of social programs.

Following Volker’s death in 1947, Volker’s nephew, Harold W. Luhnow (1895 – 1978) continued the fund’s philanthropic mission, but also used the fund to promote and disseminate ideas on free-market economics. Luhnow used Volker Fund assets to support bringing schools associated with the Austrian School of economics to US institutions. Under Luhnow’s management, the fund helped the then small minority of Old Right scholars to meet, discuss, and exchange ideas. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law, and Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty were all influenced by the ideas discussed at such meetings.

Luhnow’s commitment to liberal economic ideas grew, he used the Volker Fund to give sizable contributions to libertarian and conservative causes. Through its subsidiary the National Book Foundation, the Volker Fund distributed books by wide range of influential authors, including Hayek, von Mises, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and many others. The Volker Fund had helped Friedrich von Hayek, until then an obscure Austrian economist, become a national celebrity in America by subsidizing editions of his Road to Serfdom.[34]

[1] Kevin M. Kruse. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015). p. 7.

[2] Quinn Slobodian. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition), Kindle Locations 268-271.

[3] Ibid., Kindle Locations 305-307.

[4] Roderick T. Long. “Liberalism vs. Fascism.” (Mises Institute: November 25, 2005).

[5] Quinn Slobodian. Globalists, Kindle Location 220.

[6] Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

[7] Coudenhove-Kalergi. An idea conquers the world (London: Hutchinson, 1953). p. 247.

[8] Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 11.

[9] Edmund W. Kitch. “The Fire of Truth: A Remembrance of Law and Economics at Chicago, 1932–1970.” Journal of Law and Economics (April 1983). 26 (1): 163–234.

[10] Jennifer Burns. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 4; Mimi Reisel Gladstein. “Ayn Rand Literary Criticism.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Spring 2003), 4 (2), pp. 107–108, 124.

[11] Ludwig von Mises. Letter dated January 23, 2958. Quoted in Hülsmann, Jörg Guido (2007). Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (Auburn, Alabama: The Ludwig von Mises Institute). p. 996.

[12] Barbara Branden. The Passion of Ayn Rand (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1986),

[13] Murray Rothbard. “Swan Song of the Old Right.” Mises Institute (Jun 21, 2011).

[14] Marray N. Rothbard. “Rothbard’s Confidential Memorandum to the Volker Fund, ‘What Is To Be Done?’” Libertarian Papers (Vol. 1, Art. no. 3, 2009).

[15] Robert Van Horn & Philip Mirowski. “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism.” In Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 139–178.

[16] Michael J. McVicar. Christian Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

[17] Henry Mencken. Notes on Democracy (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1926).

[18] Pate McMichael. Klandestine: How a Klan Lawyer and a Checkbook Journalist Helped James Earl Ray Cover Up His Crime (Chicago Review Press, 2015). p. 43.

[19] Mark Ames. “Meet Charles Koch’s Brain.” Pando Quarterly, issue #7, (September 30, 2013).

[20] Paul Cantor. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty Vs. Authority in American Film and TV (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), p. 353, n. 2.

[21] Brian Doherty. Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (p. 273) (PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition).

[22] Justin Raimondo. An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2000).

[23] Murray Rothbard. “Man, Economy and State.” Ludwig von Mises Institute (1962).

[24] Nicole Hoplin & Ron Robinson. Funding Fathers: The Unsung Heroes of the Conservative Movement (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2008) p. 36.

[25] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p.. 161.

[26] Robert Van Horn & Philip Mirowski. “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism.” Cited in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 139–178.

[27] Dieter Plehwe. “Introduction.” Cited in Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe. The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 13.

[28] Yves Steiner. “Louis Rougier et la Mont Pèlerin Society : une contribution en demi-teinte1.” Philosophia Scientiæ (CS 7, 2007), p. 66.

[29] Daniel Knegt. Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce (Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017), p. 56.

[30] Daniel Knegt. Fascism, Liberalism and Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce (Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017), p. 20.

[31] Hayek. Constitution and Liberty, p. 485.

[32] William E. Scheuerman. “The unholy alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek,” Constellations, Volume 4, Issue 2, (October 1997), pp. 172–188.

[33] Hayek. Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. III, 194–95.

[34] Sharlet. The Family. pp. 190-191. 

Volume Four

1. MK-Ultra

2. Council of Nine

3. Old Right

4. Novus Ordo Liberalism

5. In God We Trust

6. Fascist International

7. Red Scare

8. White Makes Right

9. JFK Assassination

10. The Civil Rights Movement

11. Golden Triangle

12. Crowleyanity

13. Counterculture

14. The summer of Love

15. The Esalen Institute

16. Ordo ab Discordia

17. Make Love, Not War

18. Chaos Magick

19. Nixon Years

20. Vatican II

21. Priory of Sion

22. Nouvelle Droite

23. Operation Gladio