In appropriating this tradition, Mises portrayed civilisation as inextricably economic and racial. While he rejected the biological racism of the French eugenicist Arthur de Gobineau, Mises sought to rescue its 'germ' for a 'modern' race theory that ascribed racial hierarchies to an evolutionary process that gave certain races 'so long a lead that members of other races could not overtake them within a limited time'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 112