Activism versus ascetism: why libertarians Ludwig von Mises and Frank H. Knight condemned Christianity

Abstract

This article analyses views on Christianity by the two twentieth-century libertarian thinkers: Ludwig von Mises and Frank H. Knight. The first was the renovator and leader of the Austrian tradition in political economy, the second is known as co-founder of Chicago economics, both were more social thinkers than scholars. Both represented different intellectual tradition and had different personal experience, but they had very similar opinion about the Christian tradition. They nearly identically condemned Christianity for its (alleged) quietism and ascetism, they confronted the Christian tradition with the liberal ideal of activism, treated as a source of modern society. They maintained that spontaneus human action leads to racional social order (Mises) or to evolution to higher levels of social life (Knight). Both Mises and Knight perceived the Christian ideal of brethren love meaningless, useless and destroing for practical social ethics. In their opinion Christian quietism was fundamentally contradictory to free market, thus coexistence of Christianity and capitalism is impossible. It seems that such views on Christianity are an inevitable consequence of libertarian social philosophy which preferred instrumental reason upon every system of absolute values. The idea of laissez faire is incompatibile with Christian teaching.