Against the Stream

Against the Stream — Summary

Hans F. Sennholz’s “Against the Stream” is a brief single-author commemorative essay, dated April 1996, on the fiftieth anniversary setting of the Foundation for Economic Education. Its scope is institutional and intellectual: it reconstructs the postwar climate in which FEE arose, identifies the anti-collectivist writers and economists around it, and presents the foundation as a principled revival of classical liberalism.

Sennholz opens with the “battle between the creeds.” The Cold War is treated not merely as geopolitical rivalry but as a struggle over the person, property, and political authority. The West, in his telling, opposed communism without confidence in its own inheritance.

Here the general mood was one of despair about the failure of the old order and the lack of a creed of its own.

The essay’s first conceptual move is diagnostic: modern crisis did not prove liberty exhausted; it showed that liberty had been intellectually abandoned. Orwell, disillusioned socialists, old liberal journalists, and anti-New Deal scholars appear as a scattered remnant resisting total command. Sennholz then links Marxian planning and Keynesian management as different forms of the same drift toward political supremacy.

Lord Keynes and his American disciples elevated deficit spending to a political virtue, popularizing an ancient economic fallacy, inflationism, as an appropriate road to full employment and economic prosperity.

Against the claim that capitalism had failed, Sennholz offers the essay’s central revisionist thesis: the liberal order was blamed for disorders produced by intervention.

The old order had not failed, they contended, it had been smothered, expunged, and dismantled by political authority.

He sharpens the point into a moral causality of freedom and despotism.

It was the surrender of freedom that provoked the return of autocracy and tyranny.

FEE’s role follows from that diagnosis. It was not founded as an electoral machine or policy compromise, but as an educational institution devoted to a full doctrine of liberty: individual dignity, private property, natural rights, constitutional restraints, and freedom from coercion.

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) set out to reaffirm, expound, and shed fresh light on the philosophy and movement of classical liberalism which stresses not only the dignity of every individual but also the importance of property rights, natural rights, the need for constitutional limitations on government, and, especially, the freedom of every individual from any kind of political restraint.

The middle of the essay organizes this renewal around founding figures and books. Hazlitt’s Economics In One Lesson popularized the critique of economic fallacies; Mises’s Planned Chaos and Human Action supplied theoretical depth; Leonard Read’s Pattern for Revolt embodied FEE’s uncompromising style. Sennholz especially contrasts Read’s educational integrity with political ambition.

Read never ran for political office; he was not even tempted for the sake of popularity to surrender his principles and garble his speeches.

The closing section applies the same argument to postwar American policy. Sennholz describes election-year inflation, credit expansion, recessions, and later permanent deficit spending as a political business cycle of manipulation and debt transfer.

The politicians who managed to be elected subjected the American economy to severe stop-and-go manipulations.

The work’s relevance lies in its compressed self-portrait of the postwar libertarian and Austrian revival. It shows how FEE understood itself: not as nostalgia, but as a counter-institution preserving the liberal creed when planning, deficits, and administrative management seemed modern and inevitable. Its structure moves from Cold War crisis, to intellectual remnant, to institutional founding, to canonical publications, and finally to a critique of fiscal politics. Sennholz’s core moves are to shift the issue from policy technique to creed, from “market failure” to state displacement, and from political success to fidelity to principle.