I’ll stick with what I wrote about the relationship between Big Business and National Socialism, but I think it’s important to add that the relationship is typically exaggerated (sometimes to the point of distortion) by the academic Left Establishment.

While looking for Ralph Raico’s talk on the Industrial Revolution, I found a different talk of his on “The Role of the Intellectuals” (MP3) in which he mentions Yale historian Henry Ashby Turner and his book German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, published in 1985, in which

… he rebutted the claim that it was German big business which primarily financed and otherwise promoted the attainment of power by Adolf Hitler. He argued that the extent of business support for Hitler and his Nazi Party had been much exaggerated. On the basis of careful examination of unpublished records of major German corporations and of Hitler’s party, Turner concluded that the bulk of the Nazis’ funds during their rise came from their party’s members and other ordinary Germans and that the principal political recipients of big business funding were the traditional right-of-center parties, the German People’s Party and the German National People’s Party. The only election campaign in which big business contributed significant amounts of money to the Nazis was that of March 5, 1933, after they were already in power.

[source: Wikipedia]

This is my very close paraphrase of Professor Raico’s paraphrasing Professor Turner:

At the end of his book, he asks how is it that all these famous historians repeated the myths that somehow big business was behind Hitler. And he said sometimes it was because of deliberate distortion of the evidence, but that was a small part of the case.

The real reason was that they began with a natural bias against business. As intellectuals, as academics, they distrusted business and especially big business. They were willing to accept any story about big business and their terrible machinations and conspiracies against workers and consumers because they had no knowledge of — and in fact a deep suspicion and animosity towards — business.

See also: “The Schooling of Intellectuals”

Cross-posted to blog.mises:

While we’re revisiting the Industrial Revolution and the distortions of its historians, let me recommend Ralph Raico’s talk on the subject from the 2001 Mises University (MP3).

Also, in Robert LeFevre’s talks on the fear of a free market, he spends 4 sessions reviewing the Industrial Revolution: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 (also all MP3).

(If I’m forgetting anything, please link to it in the comments.)