Current Issue Article Abstracts

Volume 83, Number 2, April 2022 

ARTICLES

Eilhard Lubin, Academic Unorthodoxy, and the Dynamics of Confessional Intellectual Cultures
Tomás Antonio Valle

The standard narrative of post-Reformation confessionalization suggests that confessional cultures clamped down on intellectual creativity in order to protect orthodox theology. Taking the case of Lutheranism, this article examines Eilhard Lubin's successful defense of his subversive ideas about God, creation, and evil. I put forward the concept of "academic unorthodoxy"—based on the plural, social character of orthodoxy and the potential for disciplinary boundary-work—as a complex but analytically rich approach to the relationship between confessional orthodoxy and intellectual diversity, specifically in early modern Lutheranism but applicable to early modern confessional cultures in general.

The Mystery of Mount Vesuvius's Crosses: Belief, Credulity, and Credibility in Post-Reformation Catholicism
Stefania Tutino

In the summer of 1660, Mount Vesuvius began to erupt. After about a month, the volcano quieted down, but a strange and upsetting phenomenon started to manifest: all over the city of Naples and in the neighboring communities, a series of red and black crosses appeared on people's linens, clothes, and bodies. This essay focuses on this mysterious appearance and on the debate it provoked, using it as a case study to investigate the relationship between credulity, credibility, and belief in post-Reformation Catholicism.

Body Knowledge, Part II: Motion, Memory, and the Mythology of Modernity
Isaiah Lorado Wilner

A photograph depicts anthropologist Franz Boas posing as an Indigenous youth in search of human flesh. It looks like an icon of cultural appropriation, but behind the picture is a history of Indigenous influence. The archive of body knowledge—memories encapsulated in the motions of dance and indexed in images—reveals that the Kwak'wala-speaking peoples civilized the white man who came to study them, converting him to the Host–Guest logic of potlatch encoded in their Hamatsa dance. Seeing Boas as a host body of Indigenous knowledge radically reconfigures our understanding of influence, compelling us to ask who creates modernity.

Locating Ludwig von Mises: Introduction
Niklas Olsen, Quinn Slobodian

This special issue is a first effort at locating the Austrian economist and political philosopher Ludwig von Mises in his galaxy of influence. This introduction introduces the special issue and summarizes the papers included here. It offers an overview of the placement of Mises in existing scholarship and an outline of the more recent globalization of Mises as the figurehead of an occasionally authoritarian libertarianism through the eponymous Mises institutes that have recently been established worldwide.

The Politics of Rationality in Early Neoliberalism: Max Weber, Ludwig von Mises, and the Socialist Calculation Debate
William Callison

Initiated by Mises and popularized by Hayek, the socialist calculation debate staked a political position on a methodological axiom: the "irrationality" of state planning. This article argues that Weber's typology of "formal" vs. "substantive" rationality at once drew from Austrian School marginalism and helped frame Mises and Hayek's critiques in the calculation debate. In turn, this debate shaped an anti-socialist front among the early neoliberals before their vaunted gatherings in Paris and Mont Pèlerin. Through social scientific interventions, early neoliberalism split economics (qua market rationality) from politics (qua social justice) so as to place the latter beyond the epistemological pale.

Two Types of Separation: Ludwig von Mises and German Neoliberalism
Joshua Rahtz

Ludwig von Mises and the main figures of German ordoliberalism represent the two extreme points on the spectrum of neoliberal thinking in the twentieth century. This paper provides a comparative analysis of Mises and the Germans. Among other things, it shows how Mises and the ordoliberals held contradictory positions regarding central bank responses to the crisis of the late 1920s, the definition of the categories of the political and the economic, and above all how the latter was to be separated from the former in practice.

Repurposing Mises: Murray Rothbard and the Birth of Anarchocapitalism
Jacob Jensen

This article examines how Murray Rothbard, though he claimed to follow Ludwig von Mises very closely, ended up making a number of radical leaps that Mises never did. It argues that Rothbard constructed anarchocapitalism by repurposing Mises's economic theory. First, whereas Mises responded to interwar socialism, Rothbard redeployed his mentor's economics in response to the militarism of the right-wing. Second, whereas Mises defended the market as a consumers' democracy against ideas about economic democracy, Rothbard developed an anti-democratic view of the market in response to the egalitarianism of the counterculture. These differences in context account for the distinctiveness of anarchocapitalism.

Neoliberal Economic Thinking and the Quest for Rational Socialism in China: Ludwig von Mises and the Market Reform Debate
Isabella M. Weber

This paper investigates the long first decade of reform in China (1978–1992) to show that Mises became relevant to the reconfiguration of China's political economy in this period. Mises's critique of socialism came to be debated throughout the 1980s and Chinese economists developed their own reading of Mises and the socialist calculation debate. When Deng Xiaoping reinstated market reforms in the early 1990s, a history of thought review of the possibility of rational socialism and socialist markets helped to justify the Socialist Market Economy with Chinese Characteristics as the official designation of China's economic system to this day.