In December 1851, French President Louis Bonaparte – the future Emperor Napoléon III – seized power in a coup d’état, in violation of his oath to uphold the Constitution. He arrested the legislature; imprisoned, deported, or executed his political opponents; and deterred future dissent by massacring civilians in the streets.

When he was done he held a referendum on his coup, and announced that the voters had vindicated his actions by a vote of approximately 7,500,000 to 640,000. Bonaparte’s argument, in effect, was that 7.5 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.

In 1852 the liberal writer and former legislator Victor Hugo responded, from exile, with a book titled Napoléon the Little, the first of his many broadsides against the new régime. After casting doubt on the freedom of the elections and the genuineness of the official figures, Hugo added that even if the plebiscite had been procedurally flawless, an electoral majority had no competence to authorise Bonaparte’s crimes.

Hugo’s magnificent analysis is worth quoting at some length – both for its virtues and for its flaws:

I've been fortunate enough to have spent over half my life in the libertarian movement, and I am very grateful to have received so much in the way of friendship, insight, intellectual stimulation, emotional support, and material assistance from its members over the years.

I owe my libertarianism to two women: my mother, and Ayn Rand.

My mother, Jorie Blair Long, comes from a family of individualists and independent thinkers, and I absorbed those values early on. From her I learned that people should rely on their own judgment, seek out their own destiny, and not dictate one another's goals or poke their noses into one another's business.

My mother's political convictions were individualist as well – her family were all staunch Roosevelt-despisers of the "Old Right" tradition – but it was initially at the personal rather than at the political level that I was influenced by these values. Indeed, as a child I was thoroughly apolitical. Admittedly, I do recall being shocked and incredulous when, at the age of eleven or so, I discovered that the federal government considers a privately built or bought mailbox to be federal property. (My first episode of libertarian outrage!) But for the most part I was utterly ignorant of and indifferent to politics, and barely even knew who the President was; the political leaders who interested me were Agamemnon, and King Arthur, and Aragorn son of Arathorn.

Sixty years ago, in 1944, as the tide of World War II was turning in favor of the Allies, most western democracies thought of fascism as the antithesis of their own nations' political and economic trends. Progressive-minded folks saw fascism as "right-wing," as market capitalism taken to its fullest extreme; whereas the direction in which, e.g., Britain and the United States were moving was seen as "left-wing," toward regulatory intervention and social democracy. How could two systems be more different?

In that same year, however, three books were published that brought a most unpopular and unwelcome message: namely, that the domestic and foreign policies of countries like Britain and the United States were becoming increasingly fascistic. Just as William Graham Sumner had warned in 1898 that America's victory in the Spanish-American War, by helping to transform the U.S. into an imperial power on the Spanish model, amounted in ideological terms to the Conquest of the United States by Spain, so these three books warned that while western democracies might be defeating their fascist enemies, they were also becoming their imitators.

Critics of the current régime's so-called "War on Terror" are often accused of having a "September 10th" or "pre-9/11" mindset. (Our ever-articulate Prince President garbled both descriptions into the phrase "pre-September 10th mentality" during the first debate.) The suggestion is that everyone's worldview should have been radically transformed by the events of September 11th; anyone whose worldview wasn't so altered, anyone who continues to favour diplomacy over a resort to military force, must simply be blind to reality.

But there's a problem with this argument: it assumes that everyone's worldview needed changing. After all, any worldview that was radically altered by the September 11th attacks must have been radically mistaken to begin with. But anyone whose understanding of the world was substantially correct would not have had his or her overall view of things shaken by those events.

To speak of a 19th-century libertarian critique of fascism might seem anachronistic, since fascism is generally understood as a 20th-century phenomenon. But it did not spring from nothing, and the libertarians of the 19th century saw it in the making.

Fascism differs from its close cousins, Communism and aristocratic conservatism, in several important ways. Let’s begin with its difference from Communism. First, where Communism seeks to substitute the state for private ownership, fascism seeks to incorporate or co-opt private ownership into the state apparatus through public-private partnership. Thus fascism tends to be more tempting than Communism to wealthy interests who may see it as a way to insulate their economic power from competition through forced cartelization and other corporatist stratagems. Second, where Communist ideology tends to be cosmopolitan and internationalist, fascist ideology tends to be chauvinistically nationalist, stressing a particularist allegiance to one’s country, culture, or ethnicity; along with this goes a suspicion of rationalism, a preference for economic autarky, and a view of life as one of inevitable but glorious struggle. Fascism also tends to cultivate a “folksy” or völkisch “man of the people,” “pragmatism over principles,” “heart over head,” “pay no attention to those pointy-headed intellectuals” rhetorical style.

These contrasts with Communism should not be overstated, of course. Communist governments cannot afford to suppress private ownership entirely, since doing so leads swiftly to economic collapse. Moreover, however internationalist and cosmopolitan Communist regimes may be in theory, they tend to be just as chauvinistically nationalist in practice as their fascist cousins; while on the other hand fascist regimes are sometimes perfectly willing to pay lip service to liberal universalism. All the same, there is a difference in emphasis and in strategy between fascism and Communism here. When faced with existing institutions that threaten the power of the state – be they corporations, churches, the family, tradition – the Communist impulse is by and large to abolish them, while the fascist impulse is by and large to absorb them.

In his 1981 article "The Laissez-Faire Radical: A Quest for the Historical Mises,"¹ Murray Rothbard expressed his dissatisfaction with what he saw as the prevailing interpretation of Ludwig von Mises, according to which Mises was "made to appear a sort of National Review intellectual concentrating on the free-market aspects of conservatism."

While granting that "the image of Mises as an essential conservative is scarcely made up [out of] whole cloth," Rothbard insisted that such a characterization "totally overlooks rich strains of Misesian thought," and concluded that Mises is better understood as a radical than as a conservative:

Mises was virtually the diametric opposite of a modern conservative…. We find … a Mises with the following strongly held political views: a proclaimed pacifist, who trenchantly attacked war and national chauvinism; a bitter critic of Western imperialism and colonialism; a believer in non-intervention with regard to Soviet Russia; a strong proponent of national self-determination, not only for national groups, but for subgroups down to the village level — and in theory, at least, down to the right of individual secession … someone so hostile to immigration restrictions that he almost endorsed war against such countries as the United States and Australia to force them to open up their borders; a believer in the importance of class conflict in relation to the State; a caustic rationalist critic of Christianity and of all religion; and an admirer of the French Revolution.

Ten years later, Jeff Tucker and Lew Rockwell, in their article "The Cultural Thought of Ludwig von Mises,"² stressed by contrast the conservative side of Mises's ideas. While explicitly acknowledging the validity of Rothbard's points, Tucker and Rockwell noted: