Foreign Spokesmen for Freedom — Summary

Foreign Spokesmen for Freedom is a short reprinted review-essay from The Freeman rather than a chaptered monograph. Its object is a multi-contributor German periodical, Monatsblätter für freiheitliche Wirtschaftspolitik, edited by Dr. Volkmar Muthesius and published in Frankfurt. Mises does not list individual articles or contributors beyond Muthesius; he presents the magazine as an editor-led circle of outside writers united by a liberal, free-market program.

Mises structures the piece as a historical contrast. He begins with Germany’s earlier disasters, which he attributes not to fate but to interventionist and inflationary policy joined to intellectual conformity.

The great catastrophes that befell Germany in the first part of our century were the inevitable effect of its political and economic policies.

The crucial failure, for Mises, was not merely bad policy but the absence of public dissent. Against German conformity he sets Edwin Cannan’s example of principled resistance:

The great British economist Edwin Cannan (1861–1935) wrote that if anyone had the impertinence to ask him what he did in the Great War, he would answer, “I protested.”

This makes “protest” the essay’s core political category. A liberal order requires voices willing to name inflation, state privilege, and intervention as causes of crisis, rather than blaming foreign enemies or treaties. Mises’s indictment is sharp:

Germany’s plight consisted in the fact that it did not have, either before the armistice of 1918 or later, anybody to protest against the follies of its monetary and financial management.

The second half turns to postwar West Germany and presents Muthesius’s magazine as evidence of change. Its importance lies in independent judgment against parties, pressure groups, and official explanations.

There is in Germany today at least one monthly magazine that has both the courage and the insight to form an independent judgment on the economic and social policies of the government and the aims of the various parties and pressure groups.

Mises summarizes the contributors’ shared program: free trade at home and abroad, rejection of agricultural subsidies, criticism of antimonopoly demagogy, suspicion of union privilege, support for balanced budgets and sound money, and a guarded preference for Adenauer over the Social Democrats. Their liberalism is not party loyalty but market principle.

Doctor Muthesius and his friends are unswerving supporters of free trade both in domestic and in foreign affairs.

The essay’s relevance is Cold War and transatlantic: Mises links German liberal recovery to American support for West Berlin and compares the magazine’s fiscal outlook to American Goldwater Republicanism. Its final judgment presents the periodical itself as the achievement.

A periodical that openly and without any reservations endorses the free enterprise system and the market economy is certainly a remarkable achievement in the classical land of socialism whether imperial or social-democrat or nationalist.

Thus the “foreign spokesmen” are not incidental allies but institutional signs that liberal economic criticism can reappear even where socialism and nationalism had dominated public life.