Mises, Ludwig von. Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution

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Chapter 15. Philosophical Interpretations of History

Philosophies of History and Philosophical

Interpretations of History

THE ATTEMPTS to provide a philosophical interpreta-

tion of history must not be confused with any of the

various schemes of philosophy of history. They do not

aim at the discovery of the end toward which the proc-

ess of human history is tending. They try to bring into

relief factors that play a momentous part in determin-

ing the course of historical events. They deal with the

ends individuals and groups of individuals are aiming

at, but they abstain from any opinion about the end

and the meaning of the historical process as a whole

or about a preordained destiny of mankind. They rely

not upon intuition but upon a study of history. They

try to demonstrate the correctness of their interpreta-

tion by referring to historical facts. In this sense they

can be called discursive and scientific.

It is useless to enter into a discussion about the merits

and demerits of a definite brand of philosophy of his-

tory. A philosophy of history has to be accepted as a

whole or rejected as a whole. No logical arguments and

no reference to facts can be advanced either for or

against a philosophy of history. There is no question of

reasoning about it; what matters is solely belief or dis-

belief.

It is possible that in a few years the entire earth

323

324 THE COURSE OF HISTORY

will be subject to socialism. If this occurs, it will by no

means confirm the Marxian variety of philosophy of

history. Socialism will not be the outcome of a law op-

erating "independently of the will of men" with "the

inexorability of a law of nature." It will be precisely

the outcome of the ideas that got into the heads of men,

of the conviction shared by the majority that socialism

will be more beneficial to them than capitalism.

A philosophical interpretation of history can be mis-

used for political propaganda. However, it is easy to

separate the scientific core of the doctrine from its

political adaptation and modification.

Environmentalism

Environmentalism is the doctrine that explains histor-

ical changes as produced by the environment in which

people are living. There are two varieties of this doc-

trine: the doctrine of physical or geographical environ-

mentalism and the doctrine of social or cultural envi-

ronmentalism.

The former doctrine asserts that the essential features

of a people's civilization are brought about by geo-

graphical factors. The physical, geological, and cli-

matic conditions and the flora and fauna of a region

determine the thoughts and the actions of its inhabit-

ants.

In the most radical formulation of their thesis,

anthropogeographical authors are eager to trace back

all differences between races, nations, and civilizations

to the operation of man's natural environment.

The inherent misconception of this interpretation is

INTERPRETATIONS OF HISTORY 325

that it looks upon geography as an active and upon

human action as a passive factor. However, the geo-

graphical environment is only one of the components

of the situation in which man is placed by his birth,

that makes him feel uneasy and causes him to employ

his reason and his bodily forces to get rid of this un-

easiness as best he may. Geography (nature) provides

on the one hand a provocation to act and on the

other hand both means that can be utilized in acting

and insurmountable limits imposed upon the human

striving for betterment. It provides a stimulus but not

the response. Geography sets a task, but man has to

solve it. Man lives in a definite geographical environ-

ment and is forced to adjust his action to the conditions

of this environment. But the way in which he adjusts

himself, the methods of his social, technological, and

moral adaptation, are not determined by the external

physical factors. The North American continent pro-

duced neither the civilization of the Indian aborigines

nor that of the Americans of European extraction.

Human action is conscious reaction to the stimulus

offered by the conditions under which man lives. As

some of the components of the situation in which he

lives and is called upon to act vary in different parts of

the globe, there are also geographical differences in

civilization. The wooden shoes of the Dutch fishermen

would not be useful to the mountaineers of Switzerland.

Fur coats are practical in Canada but less so in Tahiti.

The doctrine of social and cultural environmentalism

merely stresses the fact that there is—necessarily—

continuity in human civilization. The rising generation

326 THE COURSE OF HISTORY

does not create a new civilization from the grass roots.

It enters into the social and cultural milieu that the pre-

ceding generations have created. The individual is born

at a definite date in history into a definite situation

determined by geography, history, social institutions,

mores, and ideologies. He has daily to face the altera-

tion in the structure of this traditional surrounding

effected by the actions of his contemporaries. He does

not simply live in the world. He lives in a circumscribed

spot. He is both furthered and hampered in his acting

by all that is peculiar to this spot. But he is not deter-

mined by it.

The truth contained in environmentalism is the cog-

nition that every individual lives at a definite epoch in

a definite geographical space and acts under the condi-

tions determined by this environment. The environment

determines the situation but not the response. To the

same situation different modes of reacting are thinkable

and feasible. Which one the actors choose depends on

their individuality.

The Egalitarians' Interpretation of History

Most biologists maintain that there is but one species

of man. The fact that all people can interbreed and

produce fertile offspring is taken as evidence of the

zoological unity of mankind. Yet within the species

Homo sapiens there are numerous variations which

make it imperative to distinguish subspecies or races.

There are considerable bodily differences between

INTERPRETATIONS OF HISTORY 327

the members of various races; there are also remarkable

although less momentous differences between members

of the same race, subrace, tribe, or family, even between

brothers and sisters, even between nonidentical twins.

Every individual is already at birth different bodily

from all other specimens, is characterized by individual

traits of his own. But no matter how great these dif-

ferences may be, they do not affect the logical structure

of the human mind. There is not the slightest evidence

for the thesis developed by various schools of thought

that the logic and thinking of different races are cate-

gorially different.

The scientific treatment of the inborn differences

between individuals and of their biological and physi-

ological inheritance has been grossly muddled and

twisted by political prepossessions. Behavioristic psy-

chology maintains that all differences in mental traits

among men are caused by environmental factors. It

denies all influence of bodily build upon mental activ-

ities.

It holds that equalizing the outer conditions of

human life and education could wipe out all cultural

differences between individuals, whatever their racial

or family affiliation might be. Observation contradicts

these assertions. It shows that there is a degree of corre-

lation between bodily structure and mental traits. An

individual inherits from his parents and indirectly from

his parents' ancestors not only the specific biological

characteristics of his body but also a constitution of

mental powers that circumscribes the potentialities of

his mental achievements and his personality. Some peo-

328 THE COURSE OF HISTORY

pie are endowed with an innate ability for definite kinds

of activities while others lack this gift entirely or possess

it only to a lesser degree.

The behavioristic doctrine was used to support the

program of socialism of the egalitarian variety. Egali-

tarian socialism attacks the classical liberal principle of

equality before the law. In its opinion the inequalities

of income and wealth existing in the market economy

are in their origin and their social significance not dif-

ferent from those existing in a status society. They are

the outcome of usurpations and expropriations and the

resulting exploitation of the masses brought about by

arbitrary violence. The beneficiaries of this violence

form a dominating class as the instrument of which the

state forcibly holds down the exploited. What distin-

guishes the "capitalist" from the "common man" is the

fact that he has joined the gang of the unscrupulous ex-

ploiters. The only quality required in an entrepreneur

is villainy. His business, says Lenin, is accounting and

the control of production and distribution, and these

things have been "simplified by capitalism to the ut-

most till they have become the extraordinarily simple

operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts,

within the reach of anybody who can read and write

and knows the first four rules of arithmetic."

Thus the

"property privileges" of the "capitalists" are no less

superfluous and therefore parasitic than the status privi-

leges of the aristocratic landowners were on the eve of

the Industrial Revolution. In establishing a spurious

Lenin, State and Revolution (New York, International Publishers,

1932),

pp. 83 f.

INTERPRETATIONS OF HISTORY 329

equality before the law and preserving the most iniqui-

tous of all privileges, private property, the bourgeoisie

has duped the unsuspecting people and robbed them

of the fruits of the revolution.

This doctrine, already dimly present in the writings

of some earlier authors and popularized by Jean Jacques

Rousseau and by Babeuf, was transformed in the Marx-

ian class-struggle doctrine into an interpretation of the

whole process of human history from the point of view

of usurpation. In the context of the Marxian philosophy

of history the emergence of status and class distinctions

was a necessary and historically inevitable result of the

evolution of the material productive forces. The mem-

bers of the dominating castes and classes were not indi-

vidually responsible for the acts of oppression and ex-

ploitation. They were not morally inferior to those they

held in subservience. They were simply the men in-

scrutable destiny singled out to perform a socially,

economically, and historically necessary task. As the

state of the material productive forces determined each

individual's role in the consummation of the historical

process, it was their part to carry out all they accom-

plished.

But quite a different description of the march of hu-

man affairs is provided by those writings in which Marx

and Engels deal with historical problems or with po-

litical issues of their own time. There they unreservedly

espouse the popular doctrine of the inherent moral cor-

ruption of the "exploiters." Human history appears as a

process of progressive moral corruption that started

when the blissful conditions of primeval village com-

330 THE COURSE OF HISTORY

munities were disrupted by the greed of selfish individ-

uals.

Private ownership of land is the original sin which

step by step brought about all the disasters that have

plagued mankind. What elevates an "exploiter" above

the level of his fellow men is merely villainy. In the

three volumes of Das Kapital unscrupulousness is the

only quality alluded to as required in an "exploiter."

The improvement of technology and the accumulation

of wealth that Marx considered prerequisite for the

realization of socialism are described as a result of the

spontaneous evolution of the mythical material pro-

ductive forces. The "capitalists" do not get any credit

for these achievements. All that these villains do is to

expropriate those who should by rights have the fruits

of the operation of the material productive forces. They

appropriate to themselves "surplus value." They are

merely parasites, and mankind can do without them.

This interpretation of history from the egalitarian

point of view is the official philosophy of our age. It

assumes that an automatic process of historical evolu-

tion tends to improve technological methods of produc-

tion,

to accumulate wealth, and to provide the means

for improving the standard of living of the masses.

Looking back upon conditions in the capitalistic West

as they developed in the last century or two, statisti-

cians see a trend of rising productivity and blithely

surmise that this trend will continue, whatever soci-

ety's economic organization may be. As they see it,

a trend of historical evolution is something above the

level of the actions of men, a "scientifically" established

INTERPRETATIONS OF HISTORY 331

fact which cannot be affected by men and by the social

system. Hence no harm can result from institutions—

such as the contemporary tax legislation—which aim

at ultimately wiping out the inequalities of income and

wealth.

The egalitarian doctrine is manifestly contrary to all

the facts established by biology and by history. Only

fanatical partisans of this theory can contend that what

distinguishes the genius from the dullard is entirely

the effect of postnatal influences. The presumption that

civilization, progress, and improvement emanate from

the operation of some mythical factor—in the Marxian

philosophy, the material productive forces—shaping

the minds of men in such a way that certain ideas are

successively produced contemporaneously in them, is

an absurd fable.

There has been a lot of empty talk about the non-

existence of differences among men. But there has never

been an attempt to organize society according to the

egalitarian principle. The author of an egalitarian tract

and the leader of an egalitarian party by their very

activity contradict the principle to which they pay lip

service. The historical role played by the egalitarian

creed was to disguise the most abject forms of despotic

oppression. In Soviet Russia egalitarianism is pro-

claimed as one of the main dogmas of the official creed.

But Lenin was deified after his death, and Stalin was

worshiped in life as no ruler has been since the days of

the declining Roman Empire.

The egalitarian fables do not explain the course of