Abstract
This article theorises the contemporary convergence of neoliberal and fascist principles by examining the thought of political actors in the 1930s and 1940s who were active in both neoliberal and fascist organisations. I suggest that a sympathy for fascism formed a minor but significant strand of early neoliberal thought, and that unpacking the logics that led particular thinkers and political actors to believe that fascism was compatible with neoliberalism can shed light on the contemporary political moment. Based on my reading of early ‘neoliberal fascists’, I theorise three points of convergence. The first was a belief that socialism had to be opposed by all possible means, including violence and the repression of popular democracy. The second was a racialized understanding of the underpinnings of the market economy, leading to an acceptance of the necessity of racial exclusion. Thirdly, both fascist and neoliberal thinkers believed that patriarchy was a necessary feature for the reproduction of capitalism, and hence that traditional gender roles had to be preserved against pressures for social change. In theorising this convergence, I also gesture to how the overlap of neoliberalism and fascism can be witnessed in the contemporary milieu, with a focus on the libertarian Mises Institute.
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The policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration have in many ways confounded traditional categories of political analysis. Foremost among the many theoretical debates is the problem of how to reconcile Trump’s apparently neoliberal economic outlook with the illiberal, racist and even fascistic elements of his administration that were most evident in the failed 6 January 2021 insurrection. Within the neoliberalism literature, many authors initially believed that Trump’s election in 2016 signalled the ‘end of neoliberalism’ (Bazian & Leung, 2018), and predicted a turn towards economic nationalism or corporatism (see for instance Fraser, 2016; Gusterson, 2017; Streeck, 2017). However, given Trump’s policies of tax cuts for the wealthiest and attempts to further marketize healthcare, the consensus now seems to be that Trump represented not the end of neoliberalism but rather ‘a nationalist and protectionist inflection and intensification of it’ (Dean, 2017, p. 24), or a ‘hyperreactionary neoliberalism’ according to Nancy Fraser (2019, p. 26; see also Slobodian & Plehwe, 2020). Similar debates have emerged in the fascism literature surrounding the question of whether Trump can properly be called a fascist. While noting important differences from the fascism of the 1930s, authors such as William Connolly (2017) and Jason Stanley (2018) have suggested that Trump nevertheless constitutes a new form of fascism which must be named and opposed as such. Others, particularly historians of fascism, point to significant discrepancies between Trump and historical fascism, and conclude that the fascist label trails semantic connotations that conceal more than they reveal (Griffin, 2020).Footnote 1 The aftermath of 6 6 January has led some to a reconsideration, with leading historian of fascism Robert Paxton (2021) noting that ‘Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 removes my objection to the fascist label...The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary’.Footnote 2 If the consensus now seems to be that the Trump administration represented an intensification of neoliberalism, whilst at the same time exhibiting at the very least ‘fascist creep’ (see Reid Ross, 2017), how should we reconcile these competing tendencies?
To make sense of the many contradictions evident in the Trump administration, recent scholarship has begun to ‘revise the prevalent scholarly perception of the incompatibility of neoliberalism and fascism’ (Gambetti, 2020, p. 20; see also Traverso, 2019). In The Terror of the Unforeseen, sociologist Henry Giroux argues that the economically neoliberal approach of the Trump administration is not in conflict with Trump’s racialized and socially conservative vision for America, and hence that in the Trump era, ‘America has reached a distinctive crossroads in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged’ (Giroux, 2019, p. 74; see also Giroux, 2021). Similarly, Éric Fassin (2018) suggests that ‘there is nothing incompatible between neoliberal policies and far right politics’, pointing to French President Emmanuel Macron’s punitive border policies as ‘the perfect embodiment of what can be called “neoliberal illiberalism”’. In The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism, Andrea Micocci and Flavia Di Mario’s (2018) highlight what they believe to be significant common ground between neoliberal and fascist political logics, joining other academic accounts that are increasingly open to the concept of ‘neoliberal fascism’ to explain ‘the racist, hierarchical and violent core of a form of politics that is devoted at all costs to the market mechanism’ (Martel, 2019, p. 6; see also Coles, 2018, p. 261; Dean, 2019, p. 17).
The authors I note in the previous paragraph all treat the convergence of neoliberalism and fascism as an essentially novel phenomenon confined to the present. To help theorise the contemporary conjunction between neoliberal and fascist principles, my contribution here is to return to political actors and thinkers in the 1930s and 1940s who maintained active membership of both fascist and neoliberal organisations, and who therefore represent the first instance of the convergence of neoliberal and fascist logics. The fascist sympathies of certain key actors involved in founding neoliberalism as a political and intellectual movement have been noted but largely disregarded in the extensive literature on the origins of neoliberalism (for exceptions, see Knegt, 2017; Innset, 2020, pp. 137–138). My argument here is that a sympathy and even appreciation of fascism formed a minor but significant strand of early neoliberal thought, and that unpacking the logics that led particular thinkers and political actors to believe that fascism was compatible with neoliberalism can shed light on the contemporary political moment. Whilst the most widely read neoliberal thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman rejected fascism, treating socialism and fascism as different variations of totalitarianism (Maher, 2023, pp. 6–7), for a small minority of early neoliberal thinkers fascism offered the means to accomplish their goals of a renewed market liberalism, particularly in the years prior to the Second World War. As Tony Judt (2005, p. 61) has noted, post-war Europe was characterised by ‘the search for serviceable myths of anti-fascism’, and hence the founders of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) were anxious to both obscure prior fascist sympathies and to highlight (in some cases genuine) anti-fascist credentials. Against this ‘collective amnesia’ (Judt, 2005, p. 61), this article documents the fascist sympathies and collaboration of certain early neoliberal figures, demonstrating how fascist principles continued to guide their thought in the post-war era.
In particular, I examine the writings of the following four thinkers who were both active in neoliberal organisations and adjacent to fascist movements or ideas in the 1930s and 1940s. I note first Bertrand de Jouvenel, the French political theorist and journalist who was both a leading member of the fascist Parti Populaire Français and founding member of the MPS. Secondly, I highlight French philosopher Louis Rougier, the convenor of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium which is generally considered a foundational event in the birth of neoliberalism (Reinhoudt & Audier, 2018). Rougier was initially excluded from the MPS because of his collaboration with the Vichy government during WWII, but was later allowed to join, whilst also maintaining ties with key figures in the European New Right such as Alain de Benoist. Thirdly I examine Ludwig von Mises, a leading neoliberal figure who in the early 1930s worked as economic advisor to Engelbert Dollfuss’ Austro-fascist regime and was a member of the fascist Patriotic Front (Hülsmann, 2007, p. 677). Mises saw in Austro-fascism a bulwark against both communism and the more extreme racial policies of the German Nazis he would later flee as a Jewish refugee. Finally, I also note the political thought of Wilhelm Röpke, who in his strong support for apartheid in South Africa, illustrates the influence of fascist racial ideas even in those who opposed fascist governments in Europe.
Based on my reading of the political thought of the previously noted figures, I theorise three points of convergence between neoliberal and fascist political rationalities. The first was an opposition to socialism at all costs, which led neoliberal and fascist thinkers alike to justify violence and other antidemocratic illiberal measures in the name of combatting the threat of socialism. The second point of convergence was a racialized understanding of the underpinnings of liberalism and the market economy. For both neoliberal and fascist thinkers, the economic development of European economies was the unique achievement of the white race, sometimes coded post-racially as ‘western civilisation’. Accordingly, for both neoliberals and fascists, other races threatened to undermine the cultural and racial settlement necessary for the market economy, and had to be excluded. Finally, I demonstrate that both neoliberal and fascist thinkers believed that a patriarchal social order was a necessary feature of capitalism, and hence that traditional gender roles had to be maintained against pressures for change.
In concluding the article, I examine the relevance of the convergence of neoliberal and fascist ideas for the contemporary political moment, focusing on the libertarian thinktank the Mises Institute and its political offshoot the Mises Caucus. Concerns about the potential fascist sympathies of the Mises Institute were raised recently when Mises Institute President Jeff Deist made a speech openly extolling a politics of ‘blood and soil’ (Deist, 2017). I suggest that the same three logics I located in historical neoliberal thinkers can account for the contemporary recurrence of the convergence of neoliberalism and fascism. Though members of the Mises Institute clearly admire the politics of Trump, and see in Trumpism a likely vehicle for the advancement of their political vision, I do not suggest that the combination of neoliberalism and fascism is a complete explanation for Trumpism. Trump is after all a bricolage of many competing influences, from neoliberalism and fascism to nativism, American exceptionalism, paleo-conservatism, Christian nationalism, WWE wrestling and reality TV. Rather, my focus here is on showing that two of those influences—neoliberalism and fascism—are far more compatible than we might otherwise have presumed, and that the convergence of these two logics have clear historical antecedents.
The relationship between neoliberalism and fascism
At first glance, neoliberal fascism might appear an ‘absurd conceptual bricolage’ (Maher, 2022, p. 75), and the attempt to theorise the intersection of neoliberalism and fascism an ‘exercise in political swear words’ (Knegt, 2017, p. 259). There are after all significant discrepancies between neoliberalism and fascism that suggest significant caution should be taken before conflating the two ideological frameworks. Most notably, fascism historically adopted a corporatist economic approach largely anathema to the neoliberal market economy, and accordingly fascist economic policies have been an object of significant critique by neoliberal thinkers (see for instance Lippmann, 1937, pp. 54-65). Moreover, neoliberalism is generally understood as rejecting the biological racism characteristic of fascist regimes, instead favouring the alleged racial blindness of the market mechanism.Footnote 3 Finally, neoliberal thinkers also typically support a minimum set of civil and political rights compatible with the framework of ‘negative liberty’, again marking a sharp divergence from fascism which, in the words of Mussolini (2018 [1932], p. 314), stands ‘for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State’. Accordingly, most academic and popular accounts frame the contemporary rise of nationalist-populist politics embodied in Trump as a reaction against, rather than feature of, neoliberalism. For instance, Wendy Brown’s In the Ruins of Neoliberalism argues that the contemporary success of hard-right populist politicians is an unintended consequence of forty years of neoliberalism, with Brown (2019, pp. 9-10) suggesting that although neoliberalism ‘constituted the catastrophic present, this was not neoliberalism’s intended spawn, but its Frankensteinian creation’ (see also Brown, 2018). Brown’s (2019, p. 9) reading of neoliberal thinkers emphasises that historically ‘neoliberalism aimed at permanent inoculation of market liberal orders against the regrowth of fascistic sentiments and totalitarian powers’, but that neoliberalism in practice has ‘produced a monster its founders would abhor’ (Brown, 2019, p. 17; for similar arguments that neoliberalism led to neo-fascism, see West, 2016; Connolly, 2017; Patnaik, 2020; Cayla, 2021; Cox & Skidmore-Hess, 2022).
Whilst Brown (2019, p. 9) is correct to argue that the neoliberalism of Hayek and Friedman was incompatible with fascism, for other neoliberal thinkers the relationship between fascism and the market economy was far more ambiguous. Recent literature on the racialization of markets has highlighted the racial hierarchies inherent in neoliberal constructions of the market, thereby challenging more narrows accounts of neoliberalism as a body of thought concerned merely with the spread of market principles. For example, in The Morals of the Market, Jessica Whyte (2019, p. 61) argues that ‘the [neoliberal] subject of social and economic rights was emphatically not an abstract, universal subject. Rather, race and gender marked the borders of entitlement, and designated this subject as a white, male, heterosexual’. Looking back to the early Austrian neoliberal thinkers, Cornelissen (2020, 2021) has noted the importance of racialized civilisational hierarchies in the Austrian construction of the marketplace, whilst Cooper (2021) similarly demonstrates the importance of race to the worldview of later Austrian neoliberal thinker Murray Rothbard (see also Slobodian, 2018, 2019a, 2019b; Eastland-Underwood, 2022). Cooper’s Family Values also highlights the importance of patriarchy within neoliberal thought, suggesting that the neoliberal account of gender shares many similarities with social conservative approaches to gender (see also Salzinger, 2020). However, though these different authors have demonstrated that racial and gender hierarchies are essential features of neoliberalism, most stop short of recognising a compatibility between neoliberalism and the extreme racial and gender hierarchies contained within fascism.
Building on the insights in these literatures, my contribution here is to more explicitly theorise the connection between neoliberalism and fascism by exploring the fascist sympathies evident in certain early neoliberal thinkers. That these neoliberal thinkers were attracted to fascist movements suggests that we need to reconsider the relationship between these two bodies of political thought. My argument is not that neoliberalism and fascism can be collapsed together into a totalising new ideology. Rather, I suggest that in their approach to democracy, race, and patriarchy, fascism and neoliberalism share sufficient commonalities such that they can be deployed together to construct a coherent account of the political. In a similar intellectual exercise during the Bush administration, Brown (2006) theorised the convergence of the apparently contradictory rationalities of neoliberalism and neo-conservatism. Like Brown then, my aim:
is not to understand the project of the American right tout court, as if there were such a unified endeavor or entity behind it, but to apprehend how these two rationalities, themselves composite, inadvertently converge at crucial points to extend a cannibalism of liberal democracy (Brown, 2006, p. 691).
Opposition to socialism at all costs
The first point of convergence between neoliberal and fascist rationalities was the belief that socialism represented an existential threat that needed to be opposed by all possible means, including violence and the suppression of popular democracy. Historians have long emphasised violent anti-communism as a core principle of fascism (see Payne, 1996; Passmore, 2014). In their attempts to eliminate socialism, fascist parties sought to abolish parliamentary democracy, claiming it was a distortion of the will of the people, and that only the fascist leader could truly understand and act in the interests of the people (Paxton, 2004, pp. 218–220; Stanley, 2018, pp. 182–183). Though the open celebration of violence is generally viewed as anathema to neoliberalism, critical scholars of neoliberalism have highlighted anti-democratic and authoritarian tendencies in neoliberal thought. Most noted is Friedrich Hayek’s engagement with the thought of Nazi jurist Carl Schmidt (Scheuerman 1997; Irving, 2018), and Hayek’s subsequent support for authoritarian regimes including Pinochet in Chile and Salazar in Portugal (Farrant et al., 2012). Also noted is Milton Friedman’s antipathy for popular democracy (Biebricher, 2018, pp. 91–101), and the public choice-orientated constitutionalism of James Buchanan which seeks to strictly limit the scope of popular democracy (MacLean, 2017; Biebricher, 2020). However, though the existing literature has clearly identified neoliberal impulses seeking to circumscribe the scope of democratic governance, the neoliberal thinkers considered in the existing literature are careful to distance themselves from open violence and authoritarianism, often leaving critical scholarship to draw out authoritarian tendencies from silences, euphemisms and asides in interviews (see, for instance, Fischer, 2009; Whyte, 2019, p. 117).
In contrast, the thinkers I examine here are explicit not just in their opposition to democracy, but also in their recognition of the necessity of using violence to suppress the rise of socialism. For instance, writing in 1927 Mises offers unqualified support for the fascist use of violence in opposition to communism:
The only way one can offer effective resistance to violent assaults is by violence. Against the weapons of the Bolsheviks, weapons must be used in reprisal, and it would be a mistake to display weakness before murderers (Mises, 1985 [1927], pp. 49–50).
For Mises, fascist violence was justified by the severity of the communist threat, as ‘the deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists’ (Mises, 1985 [1927], p. 49). Accordingly, Mises (1985, p. 51) noted that fascist parties were ‘full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization’. Mises’ (1985 [1927], p. 51) praise for fascism was tempered by the caveat that fascism was only ‘an emergency makeshift’, necessary to prevent the spread of communism. Nevertheless, Mises (1985 [1927], p. 49) also expressed optimism, because after the first waves of anti-communist violence in Italy and Germany, the fascist parties ‘took a more moderate course and will probably become even more so with the passage of time’. Mises (1985 [1927], p. 51) concluded that ‘the merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history’.
The electoral success of socialist and social democratic parties in the pre-war years also led early neoliberal thinkers to argue for the repression of democratic rule. In his pre-war writings, Rougier (1929) argued that liberal democracy was too vulnerable to the mass appeal of socialism, and hence had to be replaced by a more authoritarian ‘elitist’ democracy. For Rougier (1929, p. 13; my translation), universal democracy was ‘based on the idea of the “natural equality” of all men, by virtue of which they would have the same rights and same competences, which leads to collectivism and, as collectivism is impracticable, to its substitute practices, state socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Rougier is here prefiguring Hayek’s famous argument in The Road to Serfdom, suggesting that government interventions attempting to create greater equality must inevitably lead to totalitarianism, and hence even milder forms of social democracy must be repressed to prevent socialism gaining a foothold.
In Les Mystiques économiques, Rougier (1938, p. 22; my translation) claimed that the failings of liberal democracy were responsible for the spread of totalitarian regimes, because liberal democracy was based on ‘two contradictory principles…the liberal idea of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man…[and] the idea of popular sovereignty expressing itself by way of the majority’. Displaying the aristocratic sensibilities that are also evident in Bertrand de Jouvenal’s thought, Rougier warned that popular democracy would ultimately destroy liberalism—‘If the peasant is the majority, he can throw down, in one great evening, all this [liberal] superstructure which was the work of the aristocratic classes’ (1938, p. 22; my translation). Warning that the combination of compulsory education and universal suffrage would allow the masses to ‘take hold of the power of the state’ leading only to ‘impoverishment and anarchy’ (Rougier, 2018 [1938], p. 173), Rougier insisted that ‘the exercise of public affairs belonged to qualified minorities…governing is, therefore, an eminently aristocratic thing, which can only be exercised by elites’ (1938, pp. 23–24; my translation). Instead of democratic suffrage, Rougier claimed that the marketplace was the proper site for democratic deliberation of the masses, an argument also developed by Mises (Rougier, 2018 [1938], p. 99; see also Mises, 1977a [1947], pp. 25–26).
Though both Mises and Rougier initially supported the anti-communist violence of fascism and recognised the need for authoritarian governance to repress the mass appeal of socialism, by the time of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 both thinkers had recognised that the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy also posed a threat to the liberal order. In contrast, Jouvenel remained a strong supporter of fascism throughout the 1930s. The aftermath of the 6 Février 1934 parliamentary riots in Paris convinced Jouvenel that parliamentary democracy was doomed to fail,Footnote 4 and that France required an authoritarian leader similar to Hitler who could lead ‘a regime in which all particular interests are mercilessly subjected to the general interest’ (Jouvenel in Knegt, 2017, p. 77).Footnote 5 Demonstrating the sense of palingenetic ultranationalism that historian Roger Griffin (1991) emphasises as a core feature of fascism, Jouvenel (1934) argued that the youth of France needed to overthrow the calcified aging parliamentary regime to defend France from the spread of communism. As Knegt (2017, p. 92) notes, Jouvenel developed an explicitly racialized form of anti-communism, in which the working class was presented as an inferior race, in need of strict discipline from their superiors. Observing a communist rally in 1937, Jouvenel (in Knegt, 2017, p. 92) described ‘a pale, dwarf-like race, with soft mouths and red eyelids’, adding that the poorer outer suburbs of Paris had become ‘a melting pot where, under the influence of blood mixing and the conditions of the environment, a particular race is constituted. This race is now invading Paris’. Like Rougier, then, Jouvenel viewed the working classes as eminently unfit for participation in democratic governance, reinforcing the need for aristocratic or authoritarian leadership.
France’s swift defeat in WWII confirmed for Jouvenel the supremacy of fascist forms of government, with Jouvenel’s Apres Les Defaits (1941) suggesting that the tiring French establishment had been entirely unable to resist the youth and vitality of Hitler’s fascist regime, and hence that France should now take its place in Hitler’s fascist new European order. Further, even after the war when most were keen to distance themselves from fascism and collaboration, Jouvenel continued to claim that communism was the most significant threat to the liberal order, and that the anti-fascist resistance and the fascist collaborators needed to put aside their differences and work together to prevent the spread of communism (Knegt, 2017, p. 253). Thus in both the political thought and activism of early neoliberal thinkers in the 1930s and 1940s, we can locate the first intersection of fascism and neoliberalism in the shared support for violence and anti-democratic measures in pursuit of the suppression of socialism.
Racial hierarchies and market logic
The category of race has traditionally been understood as a key point of difference between neoliberalism and fascism. A hierarchical and biologically essentialised conception of race is a core feature of fascism (Passmore, 2014, pp. 108–120; Kershaw, 2015, pp. 233, 286–288). From Mussolini’s Manifesto of Race, which declared ‘it is time that Italians proclaim themselves to be openly racist’, to the Nazi politics of ‘blood and soil’, the need to preserve the racial purity of the nation against racial enemies both internal and external defined the fascist movements of the 1930s (Weiss-Wendt & Yeomans, 2013). In contrast, most scholars have treated neoliberalism as a nominally ‘racially blind’ ideology. For instance, Brown (2019, p. 13) suggests that though ‘white and male superordination are easily tucked into the neoliberal markets-and-morals project...the founding texts rarely mentioned it’. In a similarly critical account of neoliberal ‘racial blindness’, Roberts and Mahtani (2010) suggest that neoliberalism ignores the category of race as a means of overlooking the historical and contemporary racial injustices created by capitalism.
Though the ‘racially blind’ trope may be evident in the works of Hayek and Friedman, more recent scholarship has unearthed an essentialist and biological approach to race as a prominent theme in early neoliberal thought (see Slobodian, 2018, 2019a; Whyte, 2019; Cornelissen, 2020, 2021), particularly prevalent among the thinkers I consider here. In the works of Mises for example, the world is starkly divided into different races, with the ‘civilising’ achievements of each race dependent on its particular biological characteristics. As Mises (in Cornelissen, 2020, p. 354) put it, ‘the prevailing differences between the various biological strains of men are reflected in the civilizatory achievements of the group members’. Of the different races or civilisations, the western or white civilisation was clearly viewed as superior, with Mises (1977b [1962], p. 98) claiming that ‘The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state’. In contrast, other races or civilisations were viewed as necessarily stunted because of their racial inferiority. According to Mises (1998 [1949], p. 37), ‘in Africa and Polynesia primitive man stops short at his earliest perception of things and never reasons if he can in any way avoid it’, with Jouvenel (1962 [1945], p. 64) concurring that ‘primitive societies are in some degree retarded witnesses of our own processes of evolution’.
Racial differentialism became an important theme for early neoliberal thinkers because it responded to a crucial theoretical problem regarding how to ensure the necessary structures and conventions of a market society were preserved without the coercive interventions of a central governing authority. At the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, much discussion focused on the need to redefine ‘the functions of the state so as to distinguish more clearly between the totalitarian and the liberal order’ (Mont Pelerin Society, 1947), with early neoliberal thinkers struggling to account for how the market society could be created and maintained without the impermissible interventions of the state. One solution, favoured by the thinkers I consider here, was to claim that the conventions of the market society were the natural habits and characteristics of the white race, and hence that the state only needed to defend the liberal market order from external threats to western civilisation. As Mises (1998 [1949], p. 281) put it, ‘What gave to the West its eminence was precisely its concern about liberty, a social ideal foreign to the oriental peoples’. Here, the apparent racially blind neutrality of the market society gives way to an explicit orientalism and the need to preserve a racial or cultural homogeneity, with Mises (in Slobodian, 2019a, p. 152) warning that ‘there are few white men who would not shudder at the picture of many millions of black or yellow people living in their own countries’.
Wilhelm Röpke demonstrates a similarly racialized understanding of the foundations of the market economy, most evident in his defence of apartheid in South Africa. In 1964 Röpke published ‘an attempt at a positive appraisal’ of South African apartheid, praising ‘the extraordinary qualities of its white population’, and arguing that ongoing white rule was necessary because ‘the South African Negro is not only a man of an utterly different race but, at the same time, stems from a completely different type and level of civilization’ (Röpke in Slobodian, 2018, p. 152). For Röpke, allowing universal democracy in South Africa would destroy the delicate balance of the market society, and bring to power the non-white masses he believed to be biologically incapable of maintaining a functioning liberal society. Röpke’s defence of apartheid was widely disseminated not only by the South African government, but also among New Right figures in the United States, who found in Röpke’s racialized understanding of capitalism arguments that could be applied to oppose desegregation in the American south (Slobodian, 2018, pp. 153–154).
In contrast to Mises and Röpke, later neoliberal accounts would discursively pivot away from the explicit biological racism noted above, instead constructing western civilisation as a cultural grouping in line with broader trends in the European New Right. Rougier in particular worked closely with leading European New Right figure Alain de Benoist, developing a purportedly ‘post-racial’ account of a world divided into distinct and immutable cultures, which needed to be saved from the decay of multiculturalism and mass immigration.Footnote 6 In The Genius of the West, Rougier argued that western civilisation ‘is a notion which is neither solely geographic nor specifically ethnic, but essentially cultural’ (1969, p. 9; my translation), and that what marked out western civilisation as superior to its rivals was a mentality based on reason, progress and freedom. Tracing the origins of the west back to the Ancient Greeks, Rougier (1969, p. 18; my translation) claimed:
The contribution of the Greeks to Western civilization consists in having given content to the word ‘reason’. Unlike the Oriental, who bows without question before the commandments of the gods and the dictates of kings, the Greek seeks to understand by reasoning the world in which he lives and to obey only the laws he himself voted for, after deliberation.
Despite the denial of explicitly racial content, we can see here the same orientalism evident in Mises, which grounds a division of the world into a civilised, liberal west and an implicitly uncivilised, illiberal east (Said, 1994; see also Mills, 1997, p. 21; Brubaker, 2017). Rougier’s liberalism is therefore implicitly grounded in race, with Rougier arguing the respect for reason and freedom that is the hallmark of western civilisation was founded in Ancient Greece, and is perfected in the contemporary principles of liberalism, the rule of law and the market economy. Contrasting the supposed stagnation of the rest of the world with the economic supremacy of the west, Rougier argues that western success is derived from ‘respect to the law, [as] everyone is free to live as they please, to run his own business as he sees fit. It is one of the greatest innovations in the history of human societies’ (Rougier, 1969, p. 44, my translation).
Though the structuring role of race in later neoliberal thought was more euphemistic, an implicitly racialized understanding of the foundations of the market society thus remained deeply embedded in neoliberal social ontology. The account of race I have identified here is very different from the ‘racially blind’ trope developed in other strands of neoliberal thought. Instead, race is understood as either a fixed biological category or as a broader cultural grouping that must be preserved from outside interference. Notably, the use of ‘western civilisation’ as a racial euphemism is now widespread among contemporary far right and white supremacist groups (Brubaker, 2017; McSwiney et al., 2023, p. 221), demonstrating the ongoing resonance of Rougier’s account of cultural differentialism (Froio, 2018; Zúquete, 2018). A racialized understanding of the world which emphasises the necessity of preserving racial or cultural homogeneity is therefore the second point of convergence for neoliberal and fascist political rationalities.
The patriarchal basis of the market society
The final point of convergence between neoliberalism and fascism is a patriarchal conception of the ideal society. Fascism is characterised by a traditional understanding of gender roles, in which women are primarily expected to be child-bearers and homemakers responsible for reproducing the white race (Griffin, 1991, p. 73; Paxton, 2004, pp. 134–135; Carney, 2013). As Passmore (2014, pp. 124–132) notes, fascist approaches to gender were influenced by the high rates of male casualties in WWI and the resulting entry of more women into the workforce, with fascist leaders demanding a return to traditional gender roles, and strongly foregrounding the need to increase birth-rates to restore the health of the nation (see also Kershaw, 2015, p. 185). For example, in Italy promoting birth-control was considered a crime against the state (Passmore, 2014, p. 132), with fascist movements strongly opposing the emergence of feminism (Pozzi, 2020). In contrast, neoliberalism is generally understood as accepting the limited tenets of a liberal feminism in which women are free to enter the marketplace as actors with nominally equal political and civil rights (for an instructive discussion of neoliberal feminism, see Banet-Weiser et al., 2020). In a similar manner to the trope of racial blindness, neoliberal thinkers are critiqued for adopting a ‘gender blind’ perspective which means they ignore the realities of gender oppression under a market system (see for instance Szczepanska, 2022).
However, the strand of neoliberal thought I examine here adopts an understanding of gender roles far closer to fascism than liberal feminism, claiming that patriarchy is the basis of the market society and must therefore be preserved. According to neoliberal thinkers I survey here, women are biologically adapted to the role of homemakers, and need to perform that role to allow the successful functioning and reproduction of the market society. Foregrounding the patriarchal basis of capitalism, Mises critiqued feminist attempts to challenge the established social order, calling feminism ‘the spiritual child of socialism’ because ‘it is a characteristic of Socialism to discover in social institutions the origin of unalterable facts of nature, and to endeavor, by reforming these institutions, to reform nature’ (Mises, 1962 [1922], p. 101). Linking feminism to the anti-communism I discussed earlier, Mises (1962 [1922], p. 100) claimed feminism was doomed to fail because of the immutable differences between men and women, and that attempts to ignore these differences, or undermine the institution of marriage, would only harm women, because ‘in suppressing her urge towards motherhood she does herself an injury that reacts through all other functions of her being’. For Mises (1962 [1922], p. 99), marriage was a crucial institution for the ‘adjustment of the individual to the social order’, and hence ‘by ‘abolishing’ marriage one would not make woman any freer and happier; one would merely take from her the essential content of her life, and one could offer nothing to replace it’ (Mises, 1962 [1922], p. 105).
Mises’ biological conception of gender led him to the conclusion that women by their very nature were incapable of being full participants in the market society, ‘because the functions of sex have the first claim upon women, genius and the greatest achievements have been denied her’ (Mises 1962 [1922], p. 101). Accordingly, Mises suggested that the legal barriers to women that were the object of critique by both liberal and more radical feminists were not problematic, as:
The right to occupy public office is denied women less by the legal limitations of their rights than by the peculiarities of their sexual character...neither women nor the community are deeply injured by the slights to women’s legal position which still remain in the legislation of civilized states (Mises, 1962 [1922], p. 104).
Here Mises again invokes an essentialised and biological understanding of gender, and a social order in which women are denied advancement not by unjust laws or social norms, but by their own nature.
Röpke’s (1950, p. 15) writings also feature repeated attacks on the ‘disintegration of the family’, with Röpke claiming that processes of proletarianization had encouraged the spread of socialism and ‘created economic and social conditions under which the family—which is the natural sphere of the woman, the proper environment for raising children and indeed the parent cell of the community—must needs wither and finally degenerate’. In his 1937 work Economics of the Free Society, Röpke bemoaned the spread of ‘techniques which permit the separation of sexuality and procreation’ (Röpke, 1963 [1937], p. 53), labelling the use of birth control by women ‘deliberate selfishness...[that will] drag down both the birth rate and the moral health of the nation’ (Röpke, 1963 [1937], p. 55). Röpke also linked his defence of the patriarchal social order to a civilisationist worldview, claiming that communism was gaining a following because of the social dislocation caused by the decline of the western Christian order. For Röpke (1960 [1937], p. 55), the rise of communism signalled a deep-rooted ‘cultural crisis’ in which the ‘Western world’s Christian civilization’ was at stake. Communism was succeeding wherever men ‘have been pried loose from the social fabric of the family’ (Röpke, 1960, p. 110), and especially when ‘these processes of social disintegration are associated with religious decline’ (Röpke, 1960, p. 111). Thus, despite his political opposition to fascism in Germany, Röpke’s social views are here very similar to the fascist defence of the family and traditional social order.
Finally, we can locate similar views on the importance of patriarchy and the general crisis of birth-rates in Rougier and Jouvenel. For Rougier, the rise of socialism was responsible for disrupting the previous stability of the family, and therefore ultimately to blame for declining birth rates. As Rougier puts it, with the advent of the welfare state, ‘initiative disappears, the wealth decreases, the women themselves give birth little. So the threatened State, to meet its own needs, strengthens its apparatus’ (1938, pp. 30–31; my translation). Jouvenel offers a similar account of the role of patriarchy in On Power, suggesting that the civilisational advancement of the west is due to its patriarchal organisation of society. Linking to the civilisationist theme I discussed in the previous section, Jouvenel (1962 [1945], p. 77) claimed that ‘it is certain that the patriarchal way of life favours social development’, and that those societies that ‘were the first to be organized patriarchally...come before us as the real founders of states and as the truly historical societies’. In arguing that the taxation system needed to be reformed to favour the interests of families, Jouvenel (1952, p. 62) even compares the figure of the father to a dog breeder, claiming:
It is quite incomprehensible that a breeder of dogs for the racetrack should be allowed his costs, depreciation, etc., while the father of the family is not. It is as if the lawmakers sympathized more with the purpose of the former, which is to sell dogs for the track, than with the purpose of the latter, which gives men to society.
Here the role of women in social reproduction is entirely excluded, with the analogous comparison of women to dogs indicative of the centrality of patriarchy to Jouvenal’s account of the social. The resonance with a fascist view of gender and reproduction, both in this quote and across the different thinkers I have examined, should by now abundantly clear.
Echoes in the present? The Mises Institute and the Mises Caucus
This article has surveyed the historical intersection of neoliberalism and fascism. In contrast to accounts which treat neoliberalism and fascism as diametrically opposed, I have highlighted the compatibility of these two rationalities, particularly around the axes of anti-socialism, race and patriarchy. In concluding, I want to highlight the emergence of the same convergence of neoliberalism and fascism in contemporary politics, focusing on the Mises Institute and related Mises Caucus.
The Mises Institute is an American libertarian thinktank founded by Llewellyn Rockwell in 1982 to promote the thought of Ludwig von Mises and Austrian economics more broadly. The Institute combines a defence of small-state libertarianism with an extreme social conservativism that has led fellow libertarian Steve Horwitz (2011) to describe the centre as ‘a fascist fist in a libertarian glove’. In a 2017 speech current President of the Institute Jeff Deist explicitly invoked the slogan of ‘blood and soil’—two weeks before white nationalist groups chanted the same slogan at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally—with Deist offering a vision of an ethno-nationalist libertarianism that closely mirrors the themes I have identified in his intellectual forebearers. Deist (2017) claimed that ‘while libertarians enthusiastically embrace markets, they have for decades made the disastrous mistake of appearing hostile to family, to religion, to tradition, to culture, and to civic or social institutions’. Echoing Mises’ belief that state intervention destroys the patriarchal basis of the market society, Deist (2017) claimed that the state:
attempts to break down families by taking kids away from them as early as possible, indoctrinating them in state schools, using welfare as a wedge, using the tax code as a wedge, discouraging marriage and large families, in fact discouraging any kind of intimacy not subject to public scrutiny, encouraging divorce, etc. etc.
Accordingly, in the most striking iteration of the contemporary convergence of market and racial logic, Deist (2017) concluded that ‘blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance’.
Members of the Mises Institute have also embraced the anti-democratic and racist logic inherent in the Great Replacement thesis, a far-right conspiracy theory which claims that governments are encouraging mass migration to create electoral constituencies for the growth of the state and the ultimate destruction of the white race (see Feola, 2021). For example, Rockwell (2015), who remains chairman of the Institute, has claimed that mass immigration is a deliberate act of ‘cultural destructionism’, introduced by government elites seeking ‘to make the constituencies for continued government growth so large as to be practically unstoppable’. Echoing Rougier’s view on the cultural foundations of western supremacy, Rockwell (2015) claims that ‘politically enforced multiculturalism’ must be resisted to preserve the cultural homogeneity of the liberal society. Other libertarian fellow-travellers, such as Peter Brimelow,Footnote 7 make the same argument in more explicitly white supremacist language. Brimelow’s infamous anti-immigration manifesto Alien Nation claimed that ‘the free market necessarily exists within a societal framework. And it can function only if the institutions in that framework are appropriate…some degree of ethnics and cultural coherence may be among these preconditions’ (1995, p. 176). Like Mises, Brimelow uses explicitly biological language to discuss birth-rates and racial purity. For example, in 2019 Brimelow described the Christchurch massacre as an inevitable response to increased immigration and ‘western elites…repressing the white host nations’, suggesting that Muslim immigration to both New Zealand and the United States was part of a ‘great replacement’, and that ‘until the conditions that provoke [the Christchurch killer] are redressed, they [i.e. mass shootings] will keep coming’.
The convergence of ideas I have examined here now also has an explicitly named political movement in the United States, with the Mises Caucus—a group of libertarians with close connections to the Mises Institute—having recently taken control of the Libertarian Party (Doherty, 2022). Combining support for free markets with a rejection of diversity and a ‘level of racist edgelording’ that deliberately mimics the online presence of the alt-rigt (Doherty, 2022), the Mises Caucus typifies what Hermansson et al., (2020, p. 57) describe as ‘the libertarian to alt-right pipeline’ (see also Slobodian, 2019b; Cooper, 2021). According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre (Newton, 2022), ‘high-profile Mises Caucus members espouse hateful rhetoric and collaborate with white supremacists’ such as Steve Bannon and Nick Fuentes. The Mises Caucus is also closely aligned with Trump’s vision of America, with some Libertarian Party members hostile to the Mises Caucus takeover even suggesting that the real purpose of the Caucus is ‘to sabotage the Libertarian Party and sideline it over the next few years for Donald Trump’ (Newton, 2022). Regardless of whether these claims are true or not, in Trump members of the Mises Caucus clearly see a standard bearer aligned with their political movement (Newton, 2022).Footnote 8
Looking beyond the Mises Institute and Caucus, the series of recent Supreme Court decisions entrenching patriarchal norms, the increasing openness of white nationalist and Great Replacement themes in cable news, and the proliferating opposition to feminism and trans-gender rights, all point to the ongoing prominence of the convergence between neoliberal and fascist ideas I have outlined here. When Trump (2023) promises to ‘keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America’ and to develop ‘new laws’ to deal with ‘the ones that are already here’, he invokes the same anti-democratic opposition to socialism I have traced here. Likewise, the violence and cruelty on the US southern border—from Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’ proposal to shoot people crossing the border to recent reports of Texas border agents instructed to push injured migrants back into the Rio Grande River (Wermund, 2023)—is justified by narratives of a white America under attack by an external racialized other. Finally, the recent moral panic targeting transgender rights, and the broader attacks on the LGBTI community (Peele, 2023), reflect the belief that a patriarchal rendering of traditional family values is essential to the preservation of American society. As Nancy Fraser (2019) notes, the collapsing hegemony of ‘third way’ neoliberalism associated with Obama and the Clintons has created space for new articulations of the political. With Biden still struggling to formulate a compelling alternative, the combination of fascist and neoliberal ideas remains particularly dangerous. Understanding the key points at which neoliberal and fascist political rationalities are converging is thus crucial to combatting the resurgence of a racist and violent form of market politics, the historical antecedents of which I have located in the 1930s.
Notes
See also the recent debate in Fascism, in which the majority of participants find at least some relationship between the Trump administration and fascism; Jackson (2021).
Of course, nominally ‘racially blind’ policies have played a significant role in preserving racial and colonial systems of inequality; see Goldberg (2009); Bhattacharyya (2013). The point here is that the concept of race in neoliberalism is generally understood to function very differently from the essentialised and explicitly hierarchical conception of race characteristic of fascism.
The similarities between the 6 Février 1934 riots and the failed 6 January 2021 insurrection was noted by Paxton as a decisive factor in applying the label of fascist to Trump; Paxton (2021).
See also Jouvenel’s sympathetic 1936 interview with Hitler, in which Jouvenel allows Hitler to present himself as committed to peace in Europe; Jouvenel (1936).
Though not formally affiliated with the Institute, Brimelow’s books are sympathetically reviewed on the Mises Institute website and his articles featured on Rockwell’s personnel website.
Members of the Mises Caucus have also spread misinformation about alleged electoral fraud at the 2020 US Presidential election. For example, Daryl Brooks, the Mises Caucus and Libertarian Party candidate for Pennsylvania Governor, was the first witness alleging electoral fraud at Rudy Giuliani’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference in 2020; Newton (2022).
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Maher, H. Neoliberal fascism? Fascist trends in early neoliberal thought and echoes in the present. Contemp Polit Theory 23, 392–410 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00657-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-023-00657-x