http://mises.org/podcasts/war-collectivism-power-business-and-intellectual-class-world-war-iTwo essays in which Rothbard argues that World War I was the critical watershed for the American business system—a war collectivism, a totally planned economy run largely by big-business interests through the instrumentality of the central government, which became the model and inspiration for state corporate capitalism for the rest of the twentieth century.The first essay follows the businessmen who staffed the mobilization agencies that governed their own industries. The second essay follows the intellectuals, clergy, and economists for whom the war was not a catastrophe but a fulfillment.enMurray N. RothbardSerialnohttps://cdn.mises.org/images/2026-10/War-Collectivism_Rothbard_2400_20261012.jpghttp://mises.orgMises Institutemisesmedia@gmail.comhttp://mises.org/podcasts/war-collectivism-power-business-and-intellectual-class-world-war-i/war-collectivism-world-war-iMurray N. RothbardMon, 12 Oct 2026 14:43:09 -0500154702Rothbard’s account of the war economy as a cartel run by the men it regulated. He traces the Council of National Defense and the War Industries Board, whose committees were staffed by the executives of the industries they governed; price-fixing set to guarantee a “fair profit” to high-cost producers and windfalls to everyone below them; railroads nationalized under a Railroad Administration run by railroad executives; and the veterans of war collectivism who carried the model forward into the New Deal. First published in A New History of Leviathan, 1972.

]]>noCronyism and Corporatism, U.S. History, War and Foreign Policy1http://mises.org/podcasts/war-collectivism-power-business-and-intellectual-class-world-war-i/world-war-i-fulfillment-power-and-intellectualsMurray N. RothbardMon, 12 Oct 2026 14:49:09 -0500154703Against historians who treated the war as the death of progressive reform, Rothbard argues it was the culmination progressives had wanted all along. He traces the movement’s postmillennial pietist roots—a Protestantism bent on stamping out sin through the State—into wartime prohibition and the anti-vice crusades around the army camps, then through the New Republic collectivists who welcomed the war as the chance to remake society, and finally to the economists and statisticians, Richard Ely and Edwin Gay among them, who built the apparatus of government fact-gathering and their own careers along with it. First published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, 1989.

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