Ludwig von Mises: Review of Keynes’s Das Ende des Laissez-Faire

Ludwig von Mises’s short review, originally published in 1927, examines Keynes’s proposal to combine private ownership with social control. Moving from a précis of Keynes’s Berlin lecture to a critique of its title and omissions, Mises argues that economic liberalism cannot be judged apart from freedom of movement and trade. His concluding claim reverses Keynes’s diagnosis: the contemporary crisis arises from the abandonment of liberalism, not from its persistence.

Mises presents Keynes’s preferred arrangement as private ownership regulated by semi-autonomous bodies within the state. He treats this institutional middle course as familiar rather than innovative:

Keynes schlägt mithin nichts anderes vor, als was seit Jahrzehnten überall, besonders aber in deutschen Landen von der offiziellen Wissenschaft und von der ganzen öffentlichen Meinung als »Lösung der sozialen Frage« empfohlen wird.

English translation: Keynes accordingly proposes nothing other than what for decades has been recommended everywhere, but especially in German lands, by official science and by the whole of public opinion as the "solution of the social question."

The review does not develop a detailed objection to those bodies. Instead, Mises makes Keynes’s title the point of entry into a broader conceptual criticism. The full liberal maxim includes both freedom in the use of property and freedom of movement:

Die berühmte Maxime lautet nämlich vollständig Laissez faire et laissez passer.

English translation: For the famous maxim runs in full: Laissez faire et laissez passer.

Mises distinguishes faire, understood as disposal over goods apart from their movement, from passer, understood as the free movement of people and goods. While acknowledging that this interpretation may not fully accord with the maxim’s history, he insists that the two demands express one social outlook and cannot be separated at will.

Keynes’s fleeting treatment of protectionism and silence about migration therefore become central to Mises’s argument. Mises attributes these omissions to the difficulty of defending restrictions before a Berlin audience that, he suggests, included displaced people and would-be emigrants barred by workers abroad who opposed competition. Trade barriers and migration restrictions make the costs of antiliberal policy visible precisely where Keynes’s institutional proposals remain abstract.

Hätte Keynes vom Ende des Laissez faire et laissez passer gesprochen, dann hätte er nicht verkennen können, daß die Welt heute gerade daran erkrankt, daß seit Jahrzehnten eben nicht mehr nach dieser Maxime regiert wird.

English translation: Had Keynes spoken of the end of laissez faire et laissez passer, he could not have failed to see that what the world is suffering from today is precisely the fact that for decades it has no longer been governed according to this maxim.

The closing passage extends this reversal into a sweeping causal claim: war, revolution, mass poverty, unemployment, tyranny, and dictatorship are necessary consequences of worldwide antiliberalism. The brief review asserts rather than demonstrates that larger thesis. Its distinctive contribution is the insistence that any verdict on laissez-faire must also confront restrictions on international exchange and human mobility; otherwise, in Mises’s view, it mistakes the consequences of rejecting liberalism for evidence against liberalism itself.