Ludwig von Mises on Eduard Heimann’s Die sittliche Idee des Klassenkampfes und die Entartung des Kapitalismus

Ludwig von Mises’s short book review, originally published in 1928, follows the two-part argument of Heimann’s study: an ethical justification of class struggle and an indictment of capitalism through inflation, tariffs, and cartels. Its central move is to distinguish capitalism from interventionist policies whose consequences, Mises argues, Heimann mistakenly attributes to capitalism itself.

Mises first treats Heimann’s moral defense of class struggle as dependent on Marxist premises, even where these are modified by religious commitments. He identifies its justificatory mechanism precisely:

Der Klassenkampf wird als sittlich bezeichnet, weil er als Mittel zur Herbeiführung eines als sittlich befundenen Zweckes erscheint.

English translation: The class struggle is described as ethical because it appears as a means for bringing about an end held to be ethical.

For Mises, this is an instrumental, utilitarian argument: the approved end confers moral standing on the means. He questions its compatibility with a socialism grounded in the Gospel, which, on the interpretation he invokes, prohibits certain means regardless of their purposes. His references to Matthew test class struggle against injunctions concerning nonresistance, violence, and love of enemies. He compares religious defenses of class struggle to theologians’ manipulation of Scripture to bless warfare, then explicitly sets theological questions aside to concentrate on economic analysis.

The review’s longer second movement examines Heimann’s allocation of responsibility for inflation. Heimann’s appeal to cui bono makes entrepreneurs culpable because they supposedly benefited, but his own account also implicates governments, worker-oriented parties, and academic economists who presented currency depreciation as unavoidable. Mises turns this broader admission against the indictment of capitalism: the erroneous theories that discouraged stabilization belonged, he maintains, to the anti-liberal intellectual framework of academic socialism. He extends the same reversal to protectionism, accepting Heimann’s connection between tariffs and German cartels while disputing what that connection proves.

Die Uebelstände, die Heimann am deutschen Wirtschaftskörper feststellt, sind eben nichts anderes als die notwendigen Folgen der seit Jahrzehnten unter Zustimmung aller Schichten und Parteien betriebenen interventionistischen Politik.

English translation: The evils which Heimann observes in the German economic body are nothing other than the necessary consequences of the interventionist policy pursued for decades with the assent of all classes and parties.

This sentence supplies the review’s decisive causal claim. The observed disorders do not establish capitalism’s moral degeneration; Mises assigns them to longstanding intervention supported across classes and parties. The review’s relevance lies in this dispute over attribution: condemning economic outcomes requires identifying the policies and doctrines that produced them, rather than treating their occurrence within a nominally capitalist economy as sufficient evidence against capitalism. Mises closes with appreciation for Heimann’s intellectual sensitivity and struggle with the problems, preserving respect for the inquiry while rejecting its explanatory framework.