Liberalism has often been reproached for this purely external and materialistic attitude toward what is earthly and transitory. The life of man, it is said, does not consist in eating and drinking. There are higher and more important needs than food and drink, shelter and clothing. Even the greatest earthly riches cannot give man happiness; they leave his inner self, his soul, unsatisfied and empty. The most serious error of liberalism has been that it has had nothing to offer man's deeper and nobler aspirations.
But the critics who speak in this vein show only that they have a very imperfect and materialistic conception of these higher and nobler needs. Social policy, with the means that are at its disposal, can make men rich or poor, but it can never succeed in making them happy or in satisfying their inmost yearnings. Here all external expedients fail. All that social policy can do is to remove the outer causes of pain and suffering; it can further a system that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and houses the homeless. Happiness and contentment do not depend on food, clothing, and shelter, but, above all, on what a man cherishes within himself It is not from a disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism concerns itself exclusively with man's material well-being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation. It seeks to produce only outer well-being because it knows that inner, spiritual riches cannot come to man from without, but only from within his own heart. It does not aim at creating anything but the outward preconditions for the development of the inner life. And there can be no doubt that the relatively prosperous individual of the twentieth century can more readily satisfy his spiritual needs than, say, the individual of the tenth century, who was given no respite from anxiety over the problem of eking out barely enough for survival or from the dangers that threatened him from his enemies.
To be sure, to those who, like the followers of many Asiatic and medieval Christian sects, accept the doctrine of complete asceticism and who take as the ideal of human life the poverty and freedom from want of the birds of the forest and the fish of the sea, we can make no reply when they reproach liberalism for its materialistic attitude. We can only ask them to let us go our way undisturbed, just as we do not hinder them from getting to heaven in their own fashion. Let them shut themselves up in their cells, away from men and the world, in peace.
The overwhelming majority of our contemporaries cannot understand the ascetic ideal. But once one rejects the principle of the ascetic conduct of life; one cannot reproach liberalism for aiming at outer well-being.--Mises (1927), Liberalism (4-5)
For Mises the materialism of liberalism expresses a recognition of limits. The state should not be in the business of individual soul-craft nor in the business of creating a good society (in the sense of Adam Smith, Sophie Grouchy, or Lippmann). In a good society, the incentive structure of institutions, public education, and material conditions co-contribute to a flourishing society. For Mises, by contrast, and more minimally, the state should restrict itself to the material "preconditions" of the development of inner life.
Strikingly (ought implies can), Mises claims that this normative limitation on state ambition is rooted in its inability to provide spiritual goods. I call it striking because the more standard liberal arguments against the attempt are (i) that there is potentially explosive disagreement over which religious faction gets to supply these needs; and/or (ii) that often the attempt to supply these spiritual needs through the state can lead to oppressive political consequences. (Mises is familiar with (i-ii) because he mentions them in a later chapter (see pp. 50-7.) That theocracies tend to be or have tendencies toward being oppressive is common ground among liberals and seems well supported empirically; that theocracies are completely ineffective at supplying any spiritual needs is by no means obvious.
Unfortunately, Mises does not supply many arguments for his "conviction." In fact, I only discern one: that material "anxiety" prevents the development of a spiritual life. This anxiety is caused by famine/hunger and by lack of physical security. There are faint echoes with the Epicurean tradition, although it also emphasized the role of clerics in manipulating anxiety for political power.
To Mises' credit he sees that the materialism he advocates can have perverse consequences. For example, "modern wealth expresses itself above all in the cult of the body: hygiene, cleanliness, sport." (192) Strikingly, beauty and aesthetics are completely missing from Mises' attention (but would strengthen his argument.)
Even so, I do not find Mises remotely convincing here because physical hardship seems to be no barrier to intense and apparently sincere religiosity. But lurking in Mises thought is, perhaps, the further somewhat aristocratic, even Nietzschean idea that the religiosity which is fueled or conditioned by hardship is in some sense less than the "highest and deepest" spirituality. (One finds hints of such an attitude, too, in Carnap's (recall) oblique praise for Nietzsche as the right sort of metaphysical poet.) This higher spirituality requires the kind of liberty which allows full, inner development; Mises seems to take this idea for granted.
As an aside, Mises also takes for granted that the "ascetic" and material lifestyles can co-exist. This may well be thought question begging given that Mises' liberalism is self-consciously cosmopolitan and, ideally, global. It is not obvious genuine inner retreat is possible in a world-wide, fully developed consumer society. Some preferences may simply be made impossible by market society.
To return to the main point. Mises also assumes that the individual and the state exhaust the possible supply of the highest spirituality. When he thinks of communal religious activity he thinks of churches. But strikingly these are not understood as suppliers of spirituality, but rather of "instruction and education." (56) (He also thinks much of what churches teach is nonsense.) Mises has no time to spare for intermediary, communal activities that may be a source of spiritual life.
This privatized and individualized understanding of spirituality in Mises' thought is odd. Because he does explicitly recognize that a nationalist feels he participates in an "ethnic and spiritual community." (106) This is so even though Mises thinks nationalism is disastrous.
Despite the passage I quoted, I suspect Mises must assume the nationalist's experience of spirituality is in some sense delusional (perhaps even caused by a neurosis).* For, Mises is adamant about the epistemic limitations of our access to any ultimate matter:
Our powers of comprehension are very limited. We cannot hope ever to discover the ultimate and most profound secrets of the universe. But the fact that we can never fathom the meaning and purpose of our existence does not hinder us from taking precautions to avoid contagious diseases or from making use of the appropriate means to feed and clothe ourselves, nor should it deter us from organizing society in such a way that the earthly goals for which we strive can be most effectually attained. Even the state and the legal system, the government and its administration are not too lofty, too good, too grand, for us to bring them within the range of rational deliberation. Problems of social policy are problems of social technology, and their solution must be sought in the same ways and by the same means that are at our disposal in the solution of other technical problems: by rational reflection and by examination of the given conditions. All that man is and all that raises him above the animals he owes to his reason. Why should he forgo the use of reason just in the sphere of social policy and trust to vague and obscure feelings and impulses? (7)
Reason here is the constrained reason of instrumental rationality. It is notable that in his rejection of the spiritual dimension of public life, Mises ends up opening the door to a technocratic conception of public policy, but about that some other time more. But by rejecting the very possibility by fiat of any ultimate grounding for the ends pursued in social life, Mises anticipates (by way of a very different route) the Rawlsian attempt to secure a political form of liberalism. The material rewards of political liberalism may not pacify all who wish for more.
*Mises tends to locate much rejection of liberalism in what he calls a Fourier complex, which is a kind of neurosis born from frustrated ambition. Some other time I hope to discuss Mises' reliance on Freudian ideas.
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