The early Henry Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s career as a journalist, spanning almost the entire twentieth century, was driven by economic considerations from the outset. Born in Philadelphia on 28 November 1894 and raised in Brooklyn, he began working as a secretary for the Wall Street Journal at nineteen to support his struggling mother. Although he had dreamed of studying at Harvard University and attended classes at the City College of New York, he soon abandoned academic pursuits in favor of writing full-time. The bustling world of New York finance provided plenty of opportunities to learn about the economy firsthand. In his free time, Hazlitt sought intellectual stimulation in the autodidactic study of economic treatises.Footnote ²⁴

In the early 1920s, Hazlitt began studying the Austrian school and its advocacy of methodological individualism and a subjective theory of value. The first generation of the Austrian school, centered around Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and Friedrich von Wieser, had been known to American academic audiences at least since the 1890s, and several American economists had written treatises based on the Austrian approach.Footnote ²⁵ Hazlitt was introduced to Austrian thought by the economist Benjamin Anderson Jr, whom he met during his tenure as financial editor of the New York Evening Mail between 1921 and 1923. Anderson’s The Value of Money (1917) first exposed Hazlitt to the ideas of Mises, who would later become his mentor.Footnote ²⁶

Although Hazlitt’s grandparents on his mother’s side were German-speaking Alsatians and he took German classes in high school, there is no evidence in Hazlitt’s papers that he read German, so that English-speaking interpreters like Anderson were likely his first source for Austrian ideas.Footnote ²⁷ In his book, Anderson quoted freely from German texts by first-generation Austrian thinkers. He devoted significant space to Mises’s contribution to theories of value and marginal utility, long before Mises’s works were first translated into English in the 1930s.Footnote ²⁸ Hazlitt and Anderson maintained a close correspondence from the 1920s until Anderson’s death in 1949. The economist debated Hazlitt’s ideas, occasionally read his manuscripts, and significantly influenced his later career as an economics journalist. Before Hazlitt became a leading voice of the Austrian school in the American press, however, he gained his first nationwide recognition in the seemingly unrelated field of literary criticism.

Literary criticism in the New Deal era was a highly politicized field, and Hazlitt’s posts as literary editor at The Sun (1925–9) and The Nation (1930–33) allowed him to regularly address questions of political economy in signed articles. By the time he became literary editor at The Nation, he had developed a coherent profile as a writer who could bring together cultural topics with political and economic considerations. His articles ranged from detailed discussions of the business calculations that went into the production of books to reviews of the works of leading thinkers on the left, such as John Maynard Keynes and Harold J. Laski, not yet betraying the harsh anti-Keynesianism of his later work.Footnote ²⁹ Hazlitt also began to advance explicitly political arguments, for example, in a series of essays that strongly dismissed the influx of Marxist ideas into American criticism.Footnote ³⁰ Hazlitt’s politics ultimately alienated him from the increasingly progressive outlook of The Nation. Nevertheless, his early steps as a literary critic shaped his accessible writing style and his belief in what he perceived as a thoroughly entrepreneurial ideal at the heart of American culture.

Even his purely literary texts should be understood as predecessors of Hazlitt’s popular economics. In the 1920s and 1930s, Hazlitt came to be recognized as a critic of the “Brooks–Mumford School,” named after Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, the latter of whom was a friend of Hazlitt’s since high school.Footnote ³¹ Brooks and Mumford argued that the critic’s task was to establish a canon of Americana that reconciled the fundamental divide between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” notions of culture.Footnote ³² Hazlitt’s literary writing followed the premises of Brooks and Mumford. However, contrary to his mentors, who largely dismissed stereotypical images of rugged individualism, he saw the American ideal expressed above all in mythological depictions of frontier ingenuity and the pragmatic entrepreneurialism of the common person. To give an example, while Hazlitt shared Brooks’s and Mumford’s admiration for the Transcendentalist movement, he often voiced his praise in explicitly economic terms. Accordingly, for Hazlitt, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson fulfilled the ideal of a holistic man because his “interests and imagination … embraced the heavens and the Stock Exchange.”Footnote ³³ His literary texts, thus, served Hazlitt as a venue in which he could apply his interest in economics to a different genre of writing. More than that, the Brooks–Mumford approach to canonization, which fused “high” and “low” culture into a picture of supposed national virtues, became the key influence on his later advocacy of Austrian economics as an embodiment of the American ideal.

Hazlitt’s period as a literary critic ended in the context of the New Deal. In line with his early economics teacher, Anderson, who regarded the reforms as a drastic departure from nineteenth-century laissez-faire, Hazlitt was staunchly opposed to the government planning that guided President Roosevelt’s answer to the Great Depression from 1933 on. Hazlitt’s opposition to the reforms made his position at The Nation increasingly untenable, as the magazine gradually became an unofficial mouthpiece for New Deal liberalism, supporting increased government intervention in the economy.Footnote ³⁴ In May 1933, Hazlitt departed from The Nation after engaging in a final debate on economic planning with the socialist Louis Fischer, which libertarian accounts have described as a public humiliation.Footnote ³⁵

Although it alienated him from progressive parts of the New York literary establishment, Hazlitt’s opposition to the New Deal was not an isolated case among American literary intellectuals. The New Deal drove many literary writers—who had depicted individualism and the absence of a strong federal state as a national spirit grown out of the experience of the frontier—to the political right. These literati gave the impetus for the consolidation of the libertarian right in America as a protest movement defending supposed American ideals against what they saw as government overreach. Writers such as the pioneering libertarian Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of the prairie novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder, grown up in the context of the agrarian populism of the People’s Party in the late nineteenth century, exemplified how far the reaction to the New Deal entailed a shift of populism in the US as a political strategy from the left to the right.Footnote ³⁶

Hazlitt joined the ranks of writers like Lane, Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, and Isabel Paterson—many of whom he knew personally—in their activism against the extension of the federal government under Roosevelt.Footnote ³⁷ Like Hazlitt, these early libertarians often moved freely between textual genres, including fiction and narrative alongside arguments about political economy. Paterson’s column “Turns with a Bookworm,” for example, which ran from 1924 to 1949 in the New York Herald Tribune, served as a major inspiration for libertarian circles by combining traditional book reviews with opinions on economic planning and government bureaucracy.Footnote ³⁸

His close knowledge of economics made Hazlitt an influential voice among literary libertarians. Ayn Rand, who first met Hazlitt while working for his wife, Frances, at Paramount Pictures in 1941, became his close friend in the 1940s and later regularly recommended Economics in One Lesson to her peers.Footnote ³⁹ Mencken, at the time an eminent and well-connected conservative critic, stated in 1934 that Hazlitt was “one of the few economists in human history who could really write,” and therefore he was fit for the future, “for the big show in America, during the next few years, will be carried on mainly in the economic ring.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Journalist Brian Doherty later described the rising interest among libertarians in theoretical economics in the wake of the New Deal as a crucial moment in the making of modern American libertarianism. According to him, theories “imported to America by a pair of old-world Austrians, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek,” offered a “ruthless but glorious scientific logic, why state intervention in people’s economic affairs was counterproductive if wealth, efficiency, and freedom were your values,” affirming the concerns of the opponents of the New Deal.Footnote ⁴¹ Conservatives more broadly likewise turned to promoting “free enterprise” as an opposition model to New Deal liberalism.Footnote ⁴² Henry Hazlitt, who by the mid-1930s was well established as a literary critic and yet had never abandoned his early interest in economics, acted as an interpreter whose writings offered an accessible introduction to laissez-faire economics to libertarian literati and conservatives alike. After a brief stint at Mencken’s American Mercury, he capitalized on his reputation as a New Deal critic and took up a position as editorial writer at the New York Times, where he began to systematically promote works of the Austrian school for a broad American public. During this period, he also solidified his personal ties to the emergent NTC and built networks that would shape his entire career.

Hazlitt’s Austrian canon in the New York Times

Hazlitt’s literary career strengthened his belief in an American ideal of freedom, rugged individualism, and frontier ingenuity, which he found in the writings of the Transcendentalists as much as in the entrepreneurial fictions of Mark Twain. Like many of his libertarian peers, he feared that this ideal was under attack by New Deal government expansion and the growing influx of what he saw as foreign ideologies of fascism, socialism, and social democracy. True to his early economic education, he identified economic planning as the common denominator to all these ideological threats against the American way of life. By the end of his tenure at The Nation, the warning that planning would eventually lead to totalitarian control had become a frequent theme in his articles.Footnote ⁴³

As an editorial writer for the New York Times between 1934 and 1946, Hazlitt developed the motif of a growing totalitarian threat to American values further and increasingly sought to combine cultural, political, and economic concerns into one coherent narrative. The problem, he argued, was not just the strength of totalitarian ideologies but the weak position of liberalism. In numerous signed and unsigned editorials, he lamented that those who called themselves liberals had long forgotten the true economic meaning of the term and replaced it with a discourse of social liberalism fostered by New Deal advocates such as the philosopher John Dewey.Footnote ⁴⁴ Taken literally, his idiosyncratic call for a renewal of liberalism alone made Hazlitt one of the first outspoken neoliberals in the US. During his tenure at the Times, however, he also began to systematically engage with works of other intellectuals from the emergent NTC, which he presented as scientific authority for his story of American dysgenesis. A series of reviews he began in 1937 documents Hazlitt’s labor of cultural translation, which welded works by thinkers such as Friedrich A. Hayek, Walter Lippmann, and Ludwig von Mises to the iconography of American exceptionalism and made their ideas amenable to the American vernacular of free enterprise among conservatives and libertarians.

The New York Times provided an ideal platform for Hazlitt’s development into a conservative, antigovernment commentator, as its editorial board was far less enthusiastic about the New Deal than that of The Nation. Although the paper had initially lauded Roosevelt’s reforms and endorsed the president for reelection in 1936, that backing cooled off quickly. In the 1940 election, the editors supported Republican challenger Wendell Willkie, citing concerns over Roosevelt’s unprecedented emergency powers, while a harsh critique of the so-called Second New Deal tamed their 1944 endorsement of Roosevelt.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hazlitt likely received more space for his rebuttal of planning in the Times in the context of the immediate impact of the New Deal. The spring of 1937 saw a sharp economic recession in the United States, which reignited debates over economic planning and fueled long-standing criticism of Roosevelt’s reforms.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the same year, Hazlitt began publishing more extensive signed reviews and articles, which condensed the works of early neoliberal thinkers and declared the Austrian approach to economics a panacea for the dissolution of what he considered core American values.

His series of longer texts opened with a review of Lionel Robbins’s Economic Planning and International Order (1937), which contrasted a nomocratic competitive system favored by neoliberals with the deterministic planning that Hazlitt attributed to New Dealers, communists, and fascists. Hazlitt lauded the book of the later founding MPS member as “one of the ablest and most vigorous statements in recent years of the orthodox liberal position,” under threat of disappearance.Footnote ⁴⁷ Shortly after, Hazlitt followed with a review of Walter Lippmann’s The Good Society (1937), a foundational text for the neoliberal movement, for its detailed exposition of the economic aspects of totalitarianism. The book inspired the 1938 Colloque Walter Lippmann in Paris, at which prominent intellectuals, including Hayek and Mises, discussed the potential of a neoliberalism, forming networks that would, nine years later, contribute to the founding of the MPS.Footnote ⁴⁸ Hazlitt praised Lippmann’s book as “the most important volume he has yet written,” singling out the economic genealogy of the “collectivist” threat as its most distinct contribution.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, he remained lukewarm about Lippmann’s proposed alternatives and, specifically, about the idea of a central management of currencies. As a staunch supporter of hard currency, Hazlitt embraced the libertarian “goldbug” position at odds with many more moderate neoliberal proposals, yet influential on the American right.Footnote ⁵⁰ Most importantly, however, Hazlitt used Robbins’s and Lippmann’s books to construct scientific authority for his narrative of ideological conflict that pitted European planning against American freedom.

Hazlitt’s early texts for the Times ran parallel with—and in many ways anticipated—the political antitotalitarianism of the nascent NTC.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1938, he began to supplement these political arguments with the exposition of more theoretical works by economists of the Austrian school. Most notably, his glowing review of the revised American edition of Mises’s Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922 in German) lauded the Austrian school of economics as a theoretical framework that affirmed central American values under threat of disappearance. Hazlitt knew about Mises’s work from Benjamin Anderson and had discovered Socialism through a review in the London Economist, which sparked him to request a copy to discuss in the Times.Footnote ⁵² The book confirmed his ideas about the totalitarian dangers of planning and provided him with scientific authority for his own argument. His review was hyperbolic in praise. Mises had “written an economic classic in our time.”Footnote ⁵³ Hazlitt mailed his text to Mises, marking the beginning of his close personal connection with the Austrian economist.

As in his reviews of Robbins and Lippmann, Hazlitt largely glossed over Mises’s detailed economic reasoning to focus on his political impact as an antisocialist intellectual. The review summarized Mises’s argument that socialism rested on a flawed theory of economic calculation and laid out the essential Austrian counterargument, according to which only the market’s price-finding mechanism could successfully coordinate what should be produced in any society. Thus, like other texts to follow, it introduced readers to the Austrian position in the socialist calculation debate, which would be central to Hazlitt’s understanding of the Austrian school even in his later works.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hazlitt nevertheless brushed aside a more detailed exposition of how Mises reached his conclusions, declaring it not feasible in the space of the review. Although he would assume the position of an economics teacher in his later works, Hazlitt’s early reviews were rather bibliographic, recommending the Austrian works as interventions in the political debate around the New Deal to informed readers with a rudimentary grasp of economic reasoning.

The Austrian school (and above all Mises) became the standard of economic analysis for Hazlitt. In a review of A. C. Pigou’s Socialism vs. Capitalism (1938), which appeared a week after the text on Mises’s Socialism, for example, he argued that while Pigou’s book was solid in its criticism of socialist economics, it could not reach the insights of Mises’s work. He concluded, “In scope, in range of knowledge, in the acuteness, rigor and power of its reasoning, the Austrian work stands unrivaled among contemporary volumes on its subject.”Footnote ⁵⁵ From there on, Hazlitt brought up Mises, Hayek, and Robbins and their understanding of a competitive market order again and again and urged readers to consider their model as a bulwark against encroaching totalitarianism at home and abroad. In 1938 and 1939, his reviews recapitulated the Austrian position in the socialist calculation debate once more, introduced Hayek’s assessment of totalitarian control, cited Robbins as a scientific authority in the deconstruction of class conflict, and even linked what Hazlitt called “orthodox economics” to philosopher Bertrand Russell’s debate of power in international conflict.Footnote ⁵⁶ Hazlitt, in short, canonized the works of Austrian economics in the New York Times, influenced by his work as a literary critic. Whereas his criticism had been guided by the wish to find literature that represented the American ideal, his work for the Times increasingly asked which economic doctrine could best preserve the American model of individual liberties and entrepreneurial capitalism for all.

Hazlitt’s plea for “creating a revised and reinvigorated liberalism” matched Hayek’s and Mises’s wish to return to the roots of British classical liberalism as a remedy for the totalitarian politics that had plunged the world into war. His idiosyncratic understanding of a “new liberalism,” however, at the same time dovetailed with an emergent narrative of free enterprise as an “age-old custom” among American conservatives, who promoted an idealized picture of the past that integrated the advocacy of markets with the iconography of American exceptionalism.Footnote ⁵⁷ Hazlitt expressed this conservative myth most concisely in his review of Mises’s Bureaucracy (1944), in which he linked “English liberty” and American “free enterprise” and portrayed the Austrian position as the most significant defense of what he saw as true liberalism: “Published on the day after F. A. Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom,’ Professor von Mises’ ‘Bureaucracy’ once more calls attention to the ironic fact that the most eminent and uncompromising of defenders of English liberty, and the system of free enterprise which reached its highest development in America, should now be two Austrian exiles.”Footnote ⁵⁸ For conservatives, who, like former US Secretary of the Treasury Ogden Mills, described free enterprise as the foundation for America’s role as a “light that guided western civilization for over 100 years,” Hazlitt promoted Austrian economics as a theoretical field that explained the dynamics behind American progress from a scientific perspective.Footnote ⁵⁹

Hazlitt and the neoliberal thought collective

While Hazlitt reviewed new liberal thought in the New York Times, he also extended his personal connections to early neoliberals and worked behind the scenes to broaden their platform in the United States. Following his 1938 review of Socialism, Hazlitt began a fruitful exchange with Mises, who became his new mentor. When the Austrian economist migrated to the US in 1940, Hazlitt personally appealed to the State Department to procure an immigration visa for Mises’s stepdaughter, who had been in France when the family left the Continent. In 1941, he vouched for her to members of the American press to help her start a career as a writer.Footnote ⁶⁰ Between 1941 and 1943, Hazlitt helped Mises place several unsigned editorials in the Times, which addressed topics ranging from the politics of the war to more general economic principles.Footnote ⁶¹ Their relationship became closer rapidly, and Mises’s biographer, Jörg Guido Hülsmann, speculated that “Hazlitt might well have been Mises’s first close American friend.”Footnote ⁶²

Throughout the 1940s, Hazlitt also served as editor of Mises’s first English publications and negotiated deals with American publishers. The Austrian, in turn, provided extensive feedback on Hazlitt’s manuscripts.Footnote ⁶³ Hazlitt also introduced Mises to proponents of the libertarian movement, such as Ayn Rand, building networks that fueled Mises’s ongoing influence on the American right.Footnote ⁶⁴ When Mises struggled to obtain an academic position in the US, Hazlitt worked together with later FEE founder Leonard E. Read and advertising executive and NYU trustee Lawrence Fertig to arrange a post for Mises at the New York University’s Graduate School of Business Administration, paid by private funds.Footnote ⁶⁵ As a mediator between the economist, the American publishing industry, and business interest groups, Hazlitt laid the foundations for Mises’s audience in the US.

Similarly, Hazlitt bolstered Hayek’s reception among American readers. He placed an extensive review of The Road to Serfdom (1944) on the front page of the New York Times Book Review section and brokered a condensation for Reader’s Digest. Characteristically, Hazlitt’s review interpreted Hayek’s book, written for a British audience, as a defense of freedom in Britain and America alike. This amplified Hayek’s reach among American audiences to a degree that stunned even the economist himself.Footnote ⁶⁶ Still, Hazlitt’s relationship with Hayek was less personal than that with Mises, whom he addressed as “Ludwig” or “Lou” from 1942 on.Footnote ⁶⁷ The different relationship with Hayek may also have resulted from geographical distance, as Hayek did not relocate to the US until 1949.

Nevertheless, Hazlitt took an active role in Hayek’s intellectual projects after the end of the war. Above all, he was one of the few journalists invited to the founding meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 and contributed to drafting the organization’s statement of aims.Footnote ⁶⁸ While other journalists, such as former New York Times editor John Chamberlain or Pulitzer Prize-winner Felix Morley became closely involved with the MPS and Hayek’s works in the 1940s, Hazlitt occupied a unique position in the neoliberal movement due to his long-standing engagement with Austrian ideas in the 1930s, his close connections to the American libertarian literary scene, and his tireless work as a movement builder involved in founding numerous organizations promoting markets in the United States and abroad. Probably closest to Hazlitt’s ideological position was Fortune editor John Davenport, who, like Hazlitt, labored to connect market advocates to the New Right and its main outlet, the National Review, in the 1950s, and espoused issues such as the gold standard and apartheid, which were relatively fringe among European neoliberals.Footnote ⁶⁹ Both Davenport and Hazlitt were emblematic of the idiosyncratic interpretation of Austrian economics in the US, which veered much farther to the right than Hayek’s position, commonly portrayed as mainstream neoliberalism.

Festering dissent from Hayek’s ideas was visible already at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in April 1947, personified by Mises, who reportedly stormed out of a session shouting, “You’re all a bunch of socialists” because he disagreed with the proposal for a rule-based “competitive order” of the markets.Footnote ⁷⁰ Mises’s radicalism did not receive broad support among the attendees at the inaugural meeting of the MPS, with the exception of Hazlitt. He had immersed himself in Mises’s work and prepared it for American audiences as an editor and reviewer. He pushed for a Manichean understanding of Austrian economics, in which radical laissez-faire was the only way to save the American ideal from totalitarian catastrophe. By the mid-1940s, he had become not only a leading proponent of neoliberal ideas in the American media, alongside colleagues such as Davenport and Morley, but also a catalyst for the radical Misesian wing of the NTC, which argued for the widest possible absence of government intervention and embraced a populist perspective, according to which economic education was key for building a truly liberal society. This early offspring of neoliberal thought was most closely embodied in the FEE, the first American think tank dedicated largely to promoting the Austrian school.

Making economics popular

Hazlitt and Mises found significant synergies in their public advocacy of Austrian economics in the US after the end of the war. As the American economist and former president of the Mont Pelerin Society Peter J. Boettke has argued, what united Hazlitt and Mises was that both “devote[d] their lives to economic education through the written and spoken word.”Footnote ⁷¹ Both emphasized the importance of public opinion and the need to make ideas “palatable.”Footnote ⁷² Their columns for the New York Times had been a first step in this direction, albeit aimed predominantly at knowledgeable audiences. Mises’s English books of the 1940s and 1950s, especially Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949) and The Anti-capitalistic Mentality (1956), provided theoretical underpinnings for this move towards popularizing economics.Footnote ⁷³ Drawing on Hazlitt’s connections to American libertarians, their immediate postwar activism focused on building a movement that would use economic education as a weapon in the war of ideas against collectivism and saw grassroots mobilization as the premise for social change.

In the second half of the 1940s, Mises and Hazlitt engaged more closely with the American libertarian movement to create an organizational structure that could facilitate their educational venture. The FEE, the first libertarian think tank in the US, founded by businessman and founding MPS member Leonard E. Read in 1946, became the primary institutional outlet for this Misesian didacticism. Funded by business interests opposed to the New Deal, Read’s organization published a wide array of pamphlets and organized lecture tours aimed at explaining free-market economics to popular audiences.Footnote ⁷⁴ Hazlitt and Mises contributed significantly to the organization’s founding, worked in different capacities on its programs, and benefited widely from FEE publicity throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s. While Mises joined the think tank as an in-house economist, Hazlitt became the FEE’s inaugural vice president, in charge of establishing a board of trustees, as well as its most productive pamphleteer.Footnote ⁷⁵ Due to considerable overlap in personnel, the FEE is often understood as a “prototype” for the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Hayek a year later.Footnote ⁷⁶ Rather than that, the organization represented a populist wing of the NTC, demonstrating how followers of Mises in the US gradually pushed for a more radical understanding of Austrian economics, diverging from Hayek’s nomocratic order.

Read and his circle believed that writers like Hazlitt played the most important role in revivifying liberal thought in the US and beyond. At a meeting shortly before the incorporation of the FEE, Read, Mises, and Hazlitt, alongside the economist F. A. Harper and the writer Garet Garrett, argued that it was not the direct influence of Keynes or Marx that had led American public opinion towards collectivism, but rather the abundance of journalists and popular writers who picked up Keynesian or Marxist ideas while leaving market economics unrepresented. Just as advocates of the New Deal had invested in public-relations consultancy and proactive engagement with the press, the founders of the FEE sought to bolster the image of market economics by engaging popular media.Footnote ⁷⁷ They agreed that Hazlitt’s reviews in the New York Times had been a turning point for public opinion and the main reason behind the success of such books as Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Therefore, the FEE’s mission was to republish books on liberty, produce opinion pieces and reviews that could popularize proper views on economics among broader audiences, and reach out to the public directly via lecture programs.Footnote ⁷⁸ Contrary to the MPS approach of bringing together stakeholders from business, political, and academic institutions, the FEE aimed to change the perception of economics in the public sphere and to tackle the success of collectivist ideas from the ground up.

Despite its explicit populism, however, the vision of social change embraced by the FEE and its supporters was not fundamentally different from that promoted by Hayek. Like Hayek’s elitism, the populist approach rested upon engaging what Hayek called “secondhand dealers in ideas” to foster acceptance of pro-market reform.Footnote ⁷⁹ Where the FEE approach differed was that it saw popularizers, not theorists, as the most important dealers of ideas and therefore focused on promoting materials that made Austrian thought easily accessible to the average American reader. This aligned with the broader agenda of conservative media activists at the time, who, according to Nicole Hemmer, “shared a belief that political change stemmed not just from ideas but from the proper expression and diffusion of those ideas through ideological media sources.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Ultimately, the differences between FEE populism and Hayekian elitism were questions of degree, and Hayek remained a prominent supporter of, and contributor to, the foundation’s work well into the 1960s, which testifies to the long-standing coexistence of elitist and populist visions within the early neoliberal movement.Footnote ⁸¹

By connecting Austrian theory with cultural narratives of American liberty under attack, the FEE further institutionalized the mediation between the literary libertarians of the New Deal era and the professionalized neoliberal movement of the postwar era that Hazlitt had begun at the Times. Read, like Hazlitt, was deeply embedded in a network of writers such as Albert Jay Nock, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand, who were initially skeptical of the leading figures of Austrian economics and grounded their idea of liberty in an understanding of American culture.Footnote ⁸² At the same time, Read maintained good relations with business executives such as William C. Mullendore of Con Edison and Jasper Crane of DuPont, who more pragmatically hoped that Americans simply needed a better understanding of economic reasoning to reject the collectivism of the New Deal. US business interests in the 1930s and 1940s increasingly engaged in educating workers on the benefits of market capitalism, exemplified by initiatives like the National Small Business Men’s Association (NSBA), founded in 1937, a practice that grew exponentially after the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which allowed employers to distribute pro-business materials among employees.Footnote ⁸³ The FEE tapped into this new market for pamphleteering literature by bringing together literary opponents of the New Deal and Austrian economists to create a blend of economic writing that was as grounded in scientific theory as it was accessible to the layperson.

Apart from pamphlets and republished books, the magazine The Freeman became the most important outlet for the FEE’s mission. Founded by Hazlitt, John Chamberlain, and Suzanne La Follette in 1950 as a revival of an eponymous libertarian magazine edited by Nock in the 1920s, The Freeman gave space to a wide array of libertarian writers and frequently published texts by or about Austrian economists like Mises and Hayek. Like the FEE, the magazine was a joint venture that showed how Austrian economists, libertarian literati, and conservatives cooperated around the question of economic education. As early as 1944, Mises had proposed forming an “organizing committee for the publication of a new magazine,” with him and Hazlitt as board members.Footnote ⁸⁴ Read, who had titled an early pamphleteering venture which ultimately evolved into the FEE “The Freeman,” became involved early in shaping the magazine’s outlook.Footnote ⁸⁵ Initial funding was secured from the industrialists Alfred Kohlberg, J. Howard Pew, Jasper Crane, and former president Herbert Hoover.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ayn Rand advocated for Hazlitt and Chamberlain, who were both working for the anticommunist monthly Plain Talk between 1946 and 1950, as editors, since they both had “a distinguished career of ideological writing to their credit.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Chamberlain summed up the idea of The Freeman in his memoirs as a countermodel to what The Nation and the New Republic had done for New Deal liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ⁸⁸

Although conceived within the circle of founding FEE members, The Freeman was established independently at first in 1950. Initially, Hazlitt declared the goal of the magazine as promoting individual liberty and free-market capitalism to support the revival of classical liberalism in American conservative circles. Soon, however, the editorial board became divided over the political positioning of the publication. Hazlitt resigned as editor in October 1952, concerned with the growing McCarthyite sentiment of his colleagues. When Chamberlain and La Follette left the board after continued controversies in February 1953, Hazlitt returned as sole editor. Once more, he sought to restructure the magazine to focus more clearly on economic questions before resigning again in 1954, citing the need to engage in other projects.Footnote ⁸⁹ Shortly after, Read’s company, Irvington Press, owned by the FEE, bought the financially struggling Freeman, and its new editor, Frank Chodorov, restructured the magazine to embrace a more open use of the term “libertarian,” while focusing again more on economic issues. In 1956, The Freeman was finally integrated into the FEE’s nonprofit structure, and Read became managing editor.Footnote ⁹⁰ Until its discontinuation in 2016, the magazine served as the FEE’s main intellectual outlet, promoting accessible texts on Austrian economics and libertarianism. Its readership peaked in the 1980s, with a monthly circulation of around 50,000.Footnote ⁹¹ Linking Austrian economists, popular journalists, and conservative business interests, The Freeman embodied the market populist vision of the FEE and its roots in the Misesian wing of the NTC. Although Hazlitt’s tenure as editor was brief, his initial direction of the magazine in the 1950s had a significant impact on steering American conservatism towards the advocacy of market liberalism.Footnote ⁹²

In their quest to bring pro-market policies to the American people, some early FEE supporters hoped for “one blockbuster book that would really explain what was wrong with collectivism, and what was right about freedom and free enterprise.”Footnote ⁹³ Although many in Read’s circle shrugged this plan off as unrealistic and promoted the building of a diversified publishing infrastructure instead, Hazlitt’s most successful book, Economics in One Lesson, came close to fulfilling these expectations. It quickly became the FEE’s most enduring educational material. Published shortly before the founding of the FEE on 31 July 1946, Economics condensed Hazlitt’s anti-New Deal activism in the New York Times and his close reading of Mises’s works into an accessible handbook on economic common sense, which the average reader could refer to as a guide for judging the political development of the nation. The book owed its immense success in no small part to being appropriated by the FEE: the organization distributed excerpts of Economics in pamphlet form from 1946 onward and assumed its royalty rights after Hazlitt’s death in 1993, along with all his other books.Footnote ⁹⁴ To this day, the FEE offers a free e-book of Economics on their website.Footnote ⁹⁵ Reaching the fifth printing in less than one year after its publication, Economics became the first best seller on Austrian economics in the US, making the policy proposals of the FEE and its peers accessible to wide American audiences. Continuing Hazlitt’s translation of Austrian ideas for American political culture, the book furthermore testifies to the populist style of the Misesian branch of the NTC, pioneering an advocacy of market economics that spoke directly to the average American.

A Bastiat for the New Deal era

Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson reflected his close involvement with Mises’s arrival on American soil. It shaped his career trajectory from business journalist to popular spokesperson for Austrian economics in the postwar decades. The book established a self-help style of writing about economics that went beyond the bibliographic tone of Hazlitt’s Times reviews, turned the us-versus-them logic of his earlier texts into a direct appeal to the American common person, and broke down the terminology of Misesian economics into accessible set pieces, fit for popular consumption and redistribution in pamphlet format. Combining a negative rebuttal of New Deal-era policies with instructions on how to judge policy proposals of the future, Economics in One Lesson documents the translation of Austrian ideas for American political culture of its time and, therefore, can be understood as the archetype of the populist didacticism embraced by Mises and his American followers after the war.

On the surface level, Economics in One Lesson was a handy manual that propagated thinking like an economist to reveal the fallacies of the politics of the day. Specifically, it targeted popular Keynesian ideas of the era, which had guided New Deal relief programs as well as the war economics that followed. The economics of Hazlitt’s book were closely inspired by the Austrian school and drew most directly on the works of Mises. To think like an economist for Hazlitt was to spin out the consequences of policies by verbal deduction, resembling the narrative methodology of early Austrian thinkers such as Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser, as well as the praxeological school developing around Mises, which became dominant among American interpreters of the Austrian school under Murray Rothbard in the 1960s.Footnote ⁹⁶

Beyond methodology, Economics in One Lesson simplified a wide range of terminology common among the Austrian thinkers Hazlitt admired. Several chapters discussed problems of knowledge and coordination, reflecting Hayek’s and Mises’s contributions to the socialist calculation debate. A chapter titled “How the Price System Works” detailed how the price-finding mechanism solved this epistemological impasse.Footnote ⁹⁷ Hazlitt’s arguments about prices and knowledge drew on works he had reviewed for the Times—above all, Mises’s Socialism, from which he adopted the claim that the price mechanism represented a purer form of democracy than the political process.Footnote ⁹⁸ Another chapter on inflation was based on Mises’s The Theory of Money and Credit (1912 in German), which Hazlitt read while writing the book.Footnote ⁹⁹ Although the exposition of Austrian-school terms for popular audiences was a novelty when Economics in One Lesson was published, the economics of Hazlitt’s book were hardly revolutionary; what makes the book highly relevant for the history of neoliberal populism, however, was how it framed economic thought as an investigative tool for political questions and how Hazlitt presented market rationality as a weapon for the average American in their fight against the tyranny of government.

The most innovative aspect of Hazlitt’s manual was its accessible style. The book was premised on one easily digestible “lesson,” which according to Hazlitt was the essence of economic thought, forgotten in the discourse of economic planning: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The largest part of Economics consisted of applying this lesson to evaluate legislation adopted or proposed in the context of the New Deal and the Second World War, including issues such as tariffs, unionization, and full-employment bills. Throughout, Hazlitt adhered to a deductive style of analysis and a reductio ad absurdum argument, which allowed his readers to follow his line of thought closely and thereby evoked the feeling that they had discovered the shortsighted and inefficient effects of economic planning themselves.

Praise for Economics in One Lesson singled out this accessible mode of narration as Hazlitt’s most valuable contribution. The book was reviewed favorably in newspapers such as the New York Times and the Financial Times and was the subject of an extensive rebuttal in the New Republic.Footnote ¹⁰¹ As distribution by the FEE and related think tanks extended Hazlitt’s audience worldwide, he received numerous fan letters lauding his ability to digest economic principles into accessible stories.Footnote ¹⁰² Prominent members of the NTC underlined the importance of Hazlitt’s style, a position summed up by Hayek, who called the book “a brilliant performance” and concluded, “I know of no other modern book from which the intelligent layman can learn so much about the basic truths of economics in so short a time.”Footnote ¹⁰³

The emphatic style of Economics, however, was hardly Hazlitt’s invention. Instead, the book built closely upon the essay “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen” (1850) by the French liberal Frédéric Bastiat, which had similarly investigated the unseen implications of political reform proposals of the French Second Republic.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Hazlitt recognized that Bastiat’s critical essay could easily be adapted to deconstruct the economic fallacies he thought had entered the American mind in the New Deal era and explained his Economics as a “modernization, extension, and generalization of the approach found in Bastiat’s pamphlet.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ He followed Bastiat’s structure and argumentative style closely and paid homage to the subtitle of its original French publication: “Political Economy in One Lesson.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Hazlitt’s choice of model dovetailed with a Bastiat renaissance among early supporters of the FEE, spearheaded by Leonard Read, who sent copies of Bastiat’s works to all his colleagues and republished The Law (1850) through his pamphleteering ventures.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Hazlitt took this approach further and stylized himself as a Bastiat for the postwar order.

Regarding content, Hazlitt’s update of Bastiat continued the narrative of American liberties under attack that he had spun in his New York Times reviews and editorials. In the Times, however, Hazlitt had remained bibliographical by recommending the works of Austrian economists as scientific authority to an informed audience. In Economics, on the other hand, he urged readers to think like economists themselves and draw their own conclusions about the politics of the day. How closely this approach replicated its historical model is particularly evident in the chapter “Disbanding Troops and Bureaucrats,” which reformulated Bastiat’s section titled “The Disbanding of Troops.” Bastiat’s original criticized the cost of France’s standing army—the largest in Europe at the time—arguing that opposition to the army’s dissolution rested on the flawed assumption that the diminished purchasing power of the soldiers would hurt the economy as a whole. Bastiat countered that the loss of purchasing power would be offset by the reduction in taxation imposed on citizens to fund the army.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Hazlitt transposed this argument to reflect debates around the end of the American war economy in 1946. Most notably, however, he extended it to include the caste of government employees enlarged by the New Deal among those costly state servants who should be disbanded. The conclusion of Hazlitt’s chapter is illustrative not only of his close adherence to Bastiat’s original argument but also of his strategic use of the pronoun “you” to evoke a personal impact of economic policies among his readers:

Hazlitt’s imagery of the tax-financed bureaucrat as thief in this passage tapped into libertarian iconography dating back to the American Revolution and underlined the populist Manicheanism of his arguments.

Similar rhetorical pictures constructing an opposition between the government and the people can be found throughout Economics in One Lesson. Most notably, Hazlitt repeatedly portrayed the “Forgotten Man” as a victim of government overreach, referencing an eponymous 1883 lecture by American free-trade advocate William Graham Sumner.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Sumner’s text criticized political elites for promoting charity, which he argued would always come at the expense of the “forgotten” middle class. Sumner’s description of his object of study resembled the ideal of American rugged individualism that Hazlitt had idolized during his time as a literary critic:

Sumner’s text underlines that a populist appeal to the simple worker had been a stable feature of the nineteenth-century debate around free trade in the US. Nevertheless, Hazlitt referred to Sumner’s image with the explicit intention of attacking what he saw as fallacies of the New Deal. He alluded to a radio address given by Roosevelt on 7 April 1932, in which the president had appealed to the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” to justify his relief programs in the wake of the Great Depression.Footnote ¹¹² Hazlitt wrote that Roosevelt’s use of the image was a “historic irony” and that, as a result of his reforms, the forgotten man “was more completely forgotten than ever.”Footnote ¹¹³ In what can be seen as a preliminary conclusion to his book, he declared that it was “the Forgotten Man, who is always called upon to stanch the politician’s bleeding heart by paying for his vicarious generosity.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ That which is not seen by the commonsensical approach to economics, Hazlitt’s manual implied, was the cost of government policies for the common person.

Continuing the thread of his New York Times articles, Hazlitt emphasized that the conflict between the individual and expanding government bureaucracy was also an attack on essential American values. In his discussion of Keynesian understandings of inflation, he warned readers that it “plants the seeds of fascism and communism. It leads men to demand totalitarian controls. It ends invariably in bitter disillusion and collapse.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Fallacious economic ideas, in other words, would lead to a degeneration of the American character. Linking this decadence narrative closely to the debate around planning, Economics in One Lesson translated neoliberal antitotalitarianism, according to which collectivist economics paved the “road to serfdom,” for conservative American audiences.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Hazlitt’s fusion of the American iconography of rugged individualism with the antitotalitarianism of market advocates garnered praise from the American business community, which emerged as a valuable source of funding for institutions of the NTC. One of the business representatives who lauded Hazlitt’s book was John Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil Company and well networked among early FEE supporters. He praised Economics in One Lesson as an idiosyncratically American approach that made for a much-needed defense of capitalism, “written in language that should be understood by a large percentage of our people.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Economics not only marked the peak of Hazlitt’s popular style but also cemented his position as an American representative of Austrian economics and the Misesian wing of the emergent NTC. Crowning Hazlitt’s intellectual labor of the 1930s and 1940s, the book is a testament to how the pro-market program of European neoliberals was translated, localized, and popularized for US audiences after the Second World War.

Legacy

The sweeping success of Economics in One Lesson showed that Hazlitt had found a working template for how market-liberal ideas could be made accessible to broad American audiences in the 1930s and 1940s. In the following decades, he stayed true to his tested strategy of writing opinion columns and pamphlet-style books challenging policies on economic grounds. Although he was dismissed from the New York Times in 1946 over his vocal opposition to the Bretton Woods system, Hazlitt moved on to Newsweek, which further extended his nationwide platform as a journalist and teacher of popular economics.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Between 1946 and 1966, he wrote 971 signed columns for Newsweek, which appealed above all to the magazine’s growing suburban middle-class readership.Footnote ¹¹⁹ While Hazlitt largely expanded on themes he had already explored at the Times, such as inflation, social welfare, and foreign aid, he soon adapted his rhetoric to the rising tensions of the Cold War. He declared the fight against government planning an “ideological war for free enterprise” that could not be won “unless we have a real understanding of how it works, and of why Marxist socialism and Communism are fallacious.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Cold War vocabulary notwithstanding, Hazlitt still referred to the New Deal 107 times in his Newsweek columns, underscoring that it stayed a pivotal point in the development of his ideological position.

While his framing evolved alongside shifting priorities in American political culture, Hazlitt remained a staunch promoter of the Austrian school at Newsweek, primarily interested in economic topics. Throughout his columns, he mentioned Mises forty-one times, while Hayek appeared twenty-seven times. Hazlitt continued to review their books prominently and gave glowing assessments of Mises’s Human Action (1949), The Theory of Money and Credit (1912 in German, expanded in English in 1953), The Anti-capitalist Mentality (1956), and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1956), as well as Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960).Footnote ¹²¹ Occasionally, he even referenced meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society, which he described as a “group … united by a common belief in libertarian principles,” highlighting his continued engagement with key neoliberal organizations.Footnote ¹²² When Hazlitt left Newsweek in 1966, his column was taken over in part by Milton Friedman, who used the opportunity to gradually build his own platform as a “market populist.”Footnote ¹²³

As American conservatives sought to consolidate their anti-New Deal activism into a revitalized movement in the 1950s, Hazlitt remained an influential networker and mediator behind the scenes, connecting different streams of the right around the advocacy of markets. From the 1950s to the 1980s, Hazlitt exchanged hundreds of letters with William F. Buckley Jr, whose National Review became the major outlet for conservative libertarian fusionism and regularly printed articles by Mises and his acolytes.Footnote ¹²⁴ In the 1960s, he established a regular correspondence with Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, whose 1964 presidential campaign was instrumental in realigning the Republican Party around a laissez-faire platform that ultimately shaped the ascendency of Ronald Reagan.Footnote ¹²⁵ When Reagan was elected in a landslide in 1980, he lauded Hazlitt as a decisive “intellectual leader” alongside Hayek, Mises, and Friedman in his celebratory speech at the 1981 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) dinner.Footnote ¹²⁶ In a personal letter for Hazlitt’s ninetieth birthday, Reagan singled out his talent for popularization as his most enduring contribution to the revitalization of the American right, stating, “No one in this century has written more lucidly or with greater common sense on the major issues of public policy, and few individuals have enjoyed an influence as far-ranging as yours.”Footnote ¹²⁷

Hazlitt’s accessible writings on laissez-faire economics made him an influential voice in the gradual mainstreaming of neoliberal ideas within the Republican Party, which fueled the Reagan revolution. At the same time, his radical interpretation of Austrian economics from a Misesian perspective, his populist framing, and his unbending commitment to hard currency also appealed to those who wanted to push the Austrian school even further to the right, building an intellectual foundation for today’s far right. Until his death in 1993, Hazlitt stayed closely connected to those libertarian members of the NTC who thought that Hayek’s elitism did not go far enough and embraced a decisive didactic populism instead. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Hazlitt corresponded extensively with economist Murray N. Rothbard, who became the foremost heir of Mises’s praxeological approach and a leading figure in the radicalization of the Austrian school in the US. In 1961, Hazlitt joined Rothbard and Mises in an effort to create a graduate school of Austrian economics in New York City, a project spearheaded by the German economist Hans F. Sennholz, associate editor of American Opinion, the official mouthpiece of the ultraconservative John Birch Society.Footnote ¹²⁸ The project ultimately failed, and archival sources suggest that Mises and Hazlitt sought too much control over the initiative, which led to tensions among the founders.Footnote ¹²⁹ The effort still underlines that education remained a central concern for these Misesian hardliners.

Whereas Rothbard, who as early as 1972 derided “egalitarianism as a revolt against nature,” increasingly attempted to build alliances with the fringes of the American right over topics such as race and immigration, these themes appeared less prominent in Hazlitt’s works.Footnote ¹³⁰ He joined Rothbard in condemning the expansion of the welfare state in the wake of the civil rights movement, but argued, to the contrary, that the market rendered discussions of race entirely unnecessary, because only an entirely free market made equality for all possible in the first place.Footnote ¹³¹ Hazlitt developed his interpretation of a supposedly “color-blind” market most explicitly in the book The Conquest of Poverty (1973), parts of which he had presented at an MPS meeting in Munich in 1970.Footnote ¹³² Though Hazlitt’s late works aligned with the framing of the civil rights movement and the Great Society as enemies of liberty, which shaped the emerging American far right from the 1970s onwards, his downplaying of race as an analytical category was still a far cry from the cultural nativism embraced by such thinkers as Rothbard or Peter Brimelow.

What linked Hazlitt most closely to the far right was his advocacy of a hard currency. Late in his life, he received recognition as an unbending defender of gold, a stance that returned as a topic of interest on the fringes of the American right in the 1980s. The central figure in the revival of gold was Texas representative Ron Paul, who has been called the “intellectual godfather” of the Tea Party movement, and whose 1980s and 1990s newsletter combining numismatic investment advice with political propaganda served as early inspiration for the far right.Footnote ¹³³ In March 1979, at the beginning of his second term in Congress, Paul entered into the congressional record a speech by Hazlitt delivered at the FEE in 1978, along with two of his articles from The Freeman, in support of his arguments about inflation and fiat currency.Footnote ¹³⁴ When Paul chaired the US Gold Commission in 1981, he invited Hazlitt to an informal discussion and acknowledged his expertise in the field. Hazlitt, at the age of eighty-six, unwilling to travel from his home in Wilton, Connecticut, to Washington, DC, declined, yet they began an extensive correspondence that lasted at least until 1986.Footnote ¹³⁵ Hazlitt also corresponded with Paul’s chief of staff, Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr, who coined the term “paleo-libertarianism” to describe the amalgam of cultural conservatism and laissez-faire embraced by Paul’s circle, and pushed for a renewed radical fusionism as the only strategy for strengthening US conservatism in the 1990s.Footnote ¹³⁶ Rockwell institutionalized the connection between Austrian economics and the new fusionist far right when he founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in 1982. In the following decades, the institute became the most significant intellectual incubator for what Quinn Slobodian has called the “Racist–Libertarian Alliance” and a hub for leaders of the contemporary far right.Footnote ¹³⁷ Rockwell invited Hazlitt to serve on the institute’s board of advisers alongside Margit von Mises, Hayek, Paul, Rothbard, Sennholz, and the lawyer John V. Denson.Footnote ¹³⁸ At the age of eighty-eight, Hazlitt received an honorary seat at the pantheon of the latest mutation of the American right.

Although Hazlitt’s late role at the Mises Institute was rather symbolic, his career trajectory retraces the metamorphosis of the Austrian school in the twentieth century from its arrival on American soil in the late 1930s to its radicalization in the 1980s. Hazlitt’s accessible interpretation of Austrian economics as an affirmation of essential American values dovetailed with conservative populism in response to the New Deal, which remains the pivotal moment for both modern American conservatism and Hazlitt’s ideological development. Building on the success of his Economics in One Lesson and his continued networking among conservatives, libertarians, and the NTC, he was praised as an intellectual torchbearer for the triumph of American neoliberalism in the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. With his relentless promotion of radical laissez-faire and a return to the gold standard, however, he likewise inspired those among his peers who thought that Reagan did not go far enough in reclaiming American values in the name of free enterprise. The story of Hazlitt’s idiosyncratic economic didacticism thus offers not only a glimpse into how neoliberal ideas were first localized for American audiences, but also insight into the potential for radicalization among the Misesian faction of the NTC, whose populist economics provided a template for far-right market advocates from the 1980s onwards.