DRAFT VERSION
Part IV
Culture of Critique
One reason why Mises did not like to identify Jews was that he did not like to remind people how much Jews changed Austria and the West in general. After all, Jews pushed for a cultural revolution that was sweeping the West. Mises never liked to talk about the Jewish Culture of Critique and neither did Rothbard. However, Hulsmann tries to grapple with the subject by denying the problem:
Having so many people in so small a city contributed to making Vienna—from the 1870s to the 1930s—a cultural hothouse that would shape much of what was most valuable in twentieth-century civilization. In those years Vienna became the birthplace of phenomenology, medicine, psychoanalysis, Zionism, and Jugendstil (art nouveau). It was one of the cradles of modern analytical philosophy … (Biography, p. 24. Emphasis added.)
The period between 1870 and 1930 was precisely the time Jews dominated the culture of Vienna until Nazis shut down all the absurd theories and degenerative arts. Hulsmann again cites Johnston who considers all that degeneration an “achievement” but at least admits that it was Jewish.
By the 1890s, the Jewish impact on Viennese culture could not be overlooked. William Johnston remarks that at the turn of the century, when the Jewish population represented less than 9 percent of Vienna, it was responsible for almost half of the overall artistic and scientific achievement. .. Their rugged individualism transformed Vienna and western culture in the course of a few glorious decades.(Biography, p. 29, 32. Emphasis added.)
But it is one thing for unemployable degenerates to invent new shockingly immoral and absurd ideas but quite another to make them mainstream and spread them to the masses through salons, theaters and newspapers. Somebody had to paying for all that. It is probably safe to say that these degenerate Jewish dominated movements would never have escaped the asylum and taken over Western culture without the support of very rich Jewish bankers and businessmen. It is they who especially financed the Jewish newspapers, Judenpress. Or the Lugenpress (fake news) as the conservatives called it. Hulsmann proudly notes the role of the Rothschilds.
The leading organ of this liberal Jewish immigrant community was the Neue Freie Presse, which relied on the financial backing of the CreditAnstalt bank, the Austrian flagship of the house of Rothschild.16 (Biography, p. 30)
But did Mises support the Culture of Critique personally? To answer the question we have to divide the Culture of Critique into smaller parts.
- Freudian psychology
- Secularism
- Relativist values
- Modernist art
- Multiculturalism
- Cosmopolitanism
- Free immigration
- Philo-Semitism
1. Freudian psychology
Mises seems to have been very enthusiastic about Freudianism from the very beginning even if it was originally a Jewish movement to the extent that it resembled a rabbinic cult. It not only pathologized individual responsibility and self-restraint but at the same time weaponized psychology against Gentiles. Despite all this Mises called it a great intellectual movement worthy of university appointments.
In this soil, Bolzano’s epistemology, Mach’s empiricism, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Breuer’s and Freud’s psychoanalysis reached maturity. .. It would be a mistake to assume that the Austrian government promoted all of these great movements. On the contrary, it withdrew the teaching assignments of Bolzano and Brentano; it isolated Mach, and did not bother at all with Husserl, Breuer, and Freud. (Memoirs, p. 31)
Mises had private correspondence with Freud but the letters seem to have never been published since Gestapo confiscated them. In a footnote Hulsmann passingly notes the correspondence.
Footnote 84: By 1956, Mises knew that some of his books had “turned up in German second hand bookshops” and opined that some of his letters— two letters he had received from Sigmund Freud, for example—would “be found one day in the possession of an autograph dealer.” (Biography, p. 728)
It seems certain that Mises greatly admired Freud and even called him a “genius”. He never went into details but we can safely assume that he really did take Freud’s pseudoscientific theories very seriously. This despite the fact the Freud was well known to have a troubled relationship with both children and women. He tried to excuse the sexual exploitation of children by claiming it was the child who lusted after the adult. Freud’s de facto defense of pedophilia is not surprising considering that it is considered relatively normal in Talmudic culture.
The sex craze of Freud and many other Jews was certainly also a reflection of the Talmudic culture. It was the Jews who most pushed for sexual revolution and especially the creation of pornographic subculture in the West. Mises must certainly have known this but he said nothing. In this sense he defended the Freudian part of the Culture of Critique.
Freud’s relationship with women is also highly troubling. He seemed to consider them inferior and natural hysterics. Mises seems to have somewhat shared these views. Mises even presented some strange views of women in his book Socialism. He believed that a woman can never be a genius.
Extraordinarily gifted women may achieve fine things in spite of motherhood; but because the functions of sex have the first claim upon woman, genius and the greatest achievements have been denied her.16 (Biography, p. 417. Emphasis added.)
Hulsmann explains that Mises shared the theories of his close Jewish friend and student of Freud, Otto Weininger who stated in his book Sex and Character:
Thus, whereas F is totally fulfilled and taken by sexuality, M knows a dozen of other things: fight and play, sociability and [Gelage], discussion and science, business and politics, religion and art. . . . F is nothing but sexuality, M is sexual and also something above.15 (Biography, p. 416. Emphasis added.)
Hulsmann does not tell us that Weininger went even further in his book. He believed that Jews have a female soul. This is why they cannot uphold a civilization but tend to destroy it. Wikipedia explains:
In a separate chapter [of Sex and Character], Weininger, himself a Jew who had converted to Christianity in 1902, analyzes the archetypal Jew as feminine, and thus profoundly irreligious, without true individuality (soul), and without a sense of good and evil. Christianity is described as “the highest expression of the highest faith”, while Judaism is called “the extreme of cowardliness”.
Weininger decries the decay of modern times, and attributes much of it to feminine (or identically, “Jewish”) character. By Weininger’s reckoning everyone shows some femininity, and what he calls “Jewishness”.[15] (Wikipedia)
Hitler was impressed by Weininger’s theories.
In his private conversations, Hitler recalled a remark his mentor Dietrich Eckart made about Weininger: “I only knew one decent Jew and he committed suicide on the day when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples…”.[21] (Wikipedia)
Weininger’s suicide in 1903 must have shocked Mises. It also made him think deeply about Jewishness. But he decided to be as quiet about the subject as possible.