Friedrich August Hayek (1899–1992) was born a Habsburg ‘von’ – and died a Nobel Laureate (1974), a House of Windsor Companion of Honour (1984) and a recipient of President George W. H. Bush’s Medal of Freedom (1991). In The Road from Serfdom, Erik ‘Ritter von’ Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1992) explained:

Hayek (1978) grew up in Vienna, which had been at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire: ‘one of the great cultural and political centers of Europe’. When he was 19, the Habsburg Empire collapsed: the Great War was ‘a great break in my recollected history’. It also broke the Habsburg nobility: on 3 April 1919, what Hayek (1978) called ‘a republic of peasants and workers’ abolished coats of arms and titles (Adelsaufhebungsgesetz, the Law on the Abolition of Nobility).¹

Between 1917 and 1922, almost two-and-a-half millennia of order imposed by four wealthy families ended: the Romanovs (1613–1917), the Hohenzollerns (1061–1918), the Habsburgs (1276–1918) and the Ottomans (1299–1922). After 1919, two wealthy beneficiaries of one of those systems – Hayek and his patron, Ludwig Mises – sought to reconstruct a ‘spontaneous’ order.

Simultaneously, the Mises family became ‘wealthy merchants’ and in 1881 were rewarded with a ‘von’ (Hülsmann 2007, 6, 15). The Habsburgs allowed such families to turn business success into intergenerational entitlements. This led to concerns about the consequences of democracy for the sanctity of ‘property’ (Mises (1985 [1927], 19; see also Rothbard 1992; Greenspan 2008, 52; Rand 1943, 1957, 1964).

During the French Revolution, the muscadin – dandyish, musk perfume-wearing mobs – were the street-fighters of Thermidorian Reaction (the First White Terror); the return of the Bourbon King Louis XVIII led to the Second White Terror (directed at those with links to the former regimes). The Romanovs had long tolerated anti-Semitic pogroms: ‘the Jews’ were blamed for the 1881 assassination of Alexander II, Emperor and Autocrat of all the Russias. The resulting repressive May Laws (1882–1917) further restricted the civil rights of Jews. According to Peter Kenez (1991, 347), in 1919 alone 100,000 Jews were liquidated in the White Terror response to the Russian Revolution.

After three-and-a-half years as a prisoner-of-war in Russia, Otto Bauer, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs) Foreign Minister of ‘German-Austria’, negotiated a union with the defeated Germany, with Vienna as the second city after Berlin. On 5 March 1919, the Austrian president declared in parliament: ‘The Entente cannot limit the right of free disposition which is undoubtedly ours’ (New York Times 1919). However, this ‘Teutonic Union’ was prohibited by the peace treaties. According to Mises (2009a [1978], 62–63):

On 1 March 1934, Mises joined the Austro-Fascist Patriotic Front and their Werk Neues Leben social club (Hülsmann 2007, 677, n149). He had White Terror allies:

The ‘similar movements’ of ‘bloody counteraction’ that Mises (1985 [1927], 42–51, 19, 44) referred to included the anti-Semitic ‘l’Action Française’ plus ‘Germans and Italians’. (‘Italians’ obviously refers to Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome; ‘Ludendorff and Hitler’ obviously refers to the 1923 Ludendorff-Hitlerputsch or Munich Beer Hall putsch.)

In continental Europe, the search for alternative, post-neo-feudal social and political foundations were undermined by the Austrian ‘liquidation’ policies that turned the bursting of an asset price bubble into the Great Depression (Galbraith 1975, 173; Haberler 1986, 425; Hoover 1952, 30).⁵ Adolf Hitler, with his understanding about the ‘great lie’, created political disorder so as to present himself as the ‘order’-based saviour, and then justified his dictatorship with völkisch folklore. In Mein Kampf, Hitler (1939 [1925], 161, 165–166, 518) reported that an October 1918 British gas attack at Ypres ended his war: soldiers

Two years later, the Jewish-born Mises (1985 [1927], 49) predicted:

Misesian liberals and Fascists were allies but differed in tactics:

Violence was ‘the highest principle’ and must lead to

Fascism would have to embrace Mises’ (1985 [1927], 50, 19) liberalism to achieve their common aims: if Fascism ‘wanted really to combat socialism it would oppose it with ideas’. Mises would provide these ideas: ‘There is however only one idea that can be effectively opposed to socialism, viz, liberalism’. Mises provided a historicist inevitability justification:

Mises’ justification for this tactical embrace was that fascists would protect property – which he saw as the ve...