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Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises[1] (German: ['lu?tv?ç f?n
'mi?z?s]; 29 September 1881 – 10 October 1973) was an Austrian School
economist, historian, logician, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured
extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism. He is best
known for his work on praxeology, a study of human choice and action. Mises
emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1940.[2] Since the mid-20th
century, libertarian movements have been strongly influenced by Mises's
writings. Mises' student Friedrich Hayek viewed Mises as one of the major
figures in the revival of classical liberalism in the post-war era. Hayek's
work "The Transmission of the Ideals of Freedom" (1951) pays high
tribute to the influence of Mises in the 20th century libertarian movement.[3]
Mises's Private Seminar was a leading group of economists.[4] Many of its
alumni, including Friedrich Hayek and Oskar Morgenstern, emigrated from Austria
to the United States and Great Britain. Mises has been described as having
approximately seventy close students in Austria.[5]
Early life Coat of arms of Ludwig von Mises's great-grandfather, Mayer Rachmiel
Mises, awarded upon his 1881 ennoblement by Franz Joseph I of Austria Ludwig
von Mises was born to Jewish parents in the city of Lemberg, Galicia,
Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine). The family of his father, Arthur Edler von
Mises, had been elevated to the Austrian nobility in the 19th century (Edler
indicates a noble landless family) and they had been involved in financing and
constructing railroads. His mother Adele (née Landau) was a niece of Dr.
Joachim Landau, a Liberal Party deputy to the Austrian Parliament.[6]:3–9
Arthur von Mises was stationed in Lemberg as a construction engineer with the
Czernowitz railway company. By the age of 12, Mises spoke fluent German, Polish
and French, read Latin and could understand Ukrainian.[7] Mises had a younger
brother, Richard von Mises, who became a mathematician and a member of the
Vienna Circle, and a probability theorist.[8] When Ludwig and Richard were
still children, their family moved back to Vienna.[citation needed] In 1900,
Mises attended the University of Vienna,[9] becoming influenced by the works of
Carl Menger. Mises's father died in 1903. Three years later, Mises was awarded
his doctorate from the school of law in 1906.[10] Life in Europe In the years
from 1904 to 1914, Mises attended lectures given by Austrian economist Eugen
von Böhm-Bawerk.[11] He graduated in February 1906 (Juris Doctor) and
started a career as a civil servant in Austria's financial administration.
After a few months, he left to take a trainee position in a Vienna law firm.
During that time, Mises began lecturing on economics and in early 1909 joined
the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry. During World War I, Mises served
as a front officer in the Austro-Hungarian artillery and as an economic adviser
to the War Department.[12] Mises was chief economist for the Austrian Chamber
of Commerce and was an economic adviser of Engelbert Dollfuss, the
austrofascist but strongly anti-Nazi Austrian Chancellor.[13] Later, Mises was
economic adviser to Otto von Habsburg, the Christian democratic politician and
claimant to the throne of Austria (which had been legally abolished in 1918
following the Great War).[14] In 1934, Mises left Austria for Geneva,
Switzerland, where he was a professor at the Graduate Institute of
International Studies until 1940. While in Switzerland, Mises married Margit
Herzfeld Serény, a former actress and widow of Ferdinand Serény.
She was the mother of Gitta Sereny. Work in the United States External video
video icon Bettina Greaves on Ludwig von Mises's Life (1994) In 1940, Mises and
his wife fled the German advance in Europe and emigrated to New York City in
the United States.[6]:xi He had come to the United States under a grant by the
Rockefeller Foundation. Like many other classical liberal scholars who fled to
the United States, he received support by the William Volker Fund to obtain a
position in American universities.[15] Mises became a visiting professor at New
York University and held this position from 1945 until his retirement in 1969,
though he was not salaried by the university.[10] Businessman and libertarian
commentator Lawrence Fertig, a member of the New York University Board of
Trustees, funded Mises and his work.[16][17] For part of this period, Mises
studied currency issues for the Pan-Europa movement, which was led by Richard
von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a fellow New York University faculty member and
Austrian exile.[18] In 1947, Mises became one of the founding members of the
Mont Pelerin Society. In 1962, Mises received the Austrian Decoration for
Science and Art for political economy[19] at the Austrian Embassy in
Washington, D.C.[6]:1034 Mises retired from teaching at the age of 87[20] and
died at the age of 92 in New York. He is buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in
Hartsdale, New York. Grove City College houses the 20,000-page archive of Mises
papers and unpublished works.[21] The personal library of Mises was given to
Hillsdale College as bequeathed in his will.[22][23] At one time, Mises praised
the work of writer Ayn Rand and she generally looked on his work with favor,
but the two had a volatile relationship, with strong disagreements for example
over the moral basis of capitalism.[24] Contributions and influence in
economics This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help
improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced
material may be challenged and removed. (August 2013) (Learn how and when to
remove this template message) Mises wrote and lectured extensively on behalf of
classical liberalism.[25] In his magnum opus Human Action, Mises adopted
praxeology as a general conceptual foundation of the social sciences and set
forth his methodological approach to economics. Mises was for economic
non-interventionism[26] and was an anti-imperialist.[27] He referred to the
Great War as such a watershed event in human history and wrote that "war
has become more fearful and destructive than ever before because it is now
waged with all the means of the highly developed technique that the free
economy has created. Bourgeois civilization has built railroads and electric
power plants, has invented explosives and airplanes, in order to create wealth.
Imperialism has placed the tools of peace in the service of destruction. With
modern means it would be easy to wipe out humanity at one blow."[28] In
1920, Mises introduced in an article his Economic Calculation Problem as a
critique of socialisms which are based on planned economies and renunciations
of the price mechanism.[29] In his first article "Economic Calculation in
the Socialist Commonwealth", Mises describes the nature of the price
system under capitalism and describes how individual subjective values are
translated into the objective information necessary for rational allocation of
resources in society.[29] Mises argued that the pricing systems in socialist
economies were necessarily deficient because if a public entity owned all the
means of production, no rational prices could be obtained for capital goods as
they were merely internal transfers of goods and not "objects of
exchange", unlike final goods. Therefore, they were unpriced and hence the
system would be necessarily irrational, as the central planners would not know
how to allocate the available resources efficiently.[29] He wrote that
"rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist
commonwealth".[29] Mises developed his critique of socialism more
completely in his 1922 book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis,
arguing that the market price system is an expression of praxeology and can not
be replicated by any form of bureaucracy. Friends and students of Mises in
Europe included Wilhelm Röpke and Alfred Müller-Armack (advisors to
German chancellor Ludwig Erhard), Jacques Rueff (monetary advisor to Charles de
Gaulle), Gottfried Haberler (later a professor at Harvard), Lionel, Lord
Robbins (of the London School of Economics), Italian President Luigi Einaudi,
and Leonid Hurwicz, recipient of the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Sciences.[30] Economist and political theorist Friedrich Hayek first came to
know Mises while working as his subordinate at a government office dealing with
Austria's post-World War I debt. While toasting Mises at a party in 1956, Hayek
said: "I came to know him as one of the best educated and informed men I
have ever known".[14]:219–20 Mises's seminars in Vienna fostered
lively discussion among established economists there. The meetings were also
visited by other important economists who happened to be traveling through
Vienna. At his New York University seminar and at informal meetings at his
apartment, Mises attracted college and high school students who had heard of
his European reputation. They listened while he gave carefully prepared
lectures from notes.[31][32] Among those who attended his informal seminar over
the course of two decades in New York were Israel Kirzner, Hans Sennholz, Ralph
Raico, Leonard Liggio, George Reisman and Murray Rothbard.[33] Mises's work
also influenced other Americans, including Benjamin Anderson, Leonard Read,
Henry Hazlitt, Max Eastman, legal scholar Sylvester J. Petro and novelist Ayn
Rand. Reception Debates about Mises's arguments Economic historian Bruce
Caldwell wrote that in the mid-20th century, with the ascendance of positivism
and Keynesianism, Mises came to be regarded by many as the "archetypal
'unscientific' economist".[34] In a 1957 review of his book The
Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, The Economist said of Mises: "Professor von
Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but
as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of
Hyde Park standard".[35] Conservative commentator Whittaker Chambers
published a similarly negative review of that book in the National Review,
stating that Mises's thesis that anti-capitalist sentiment was rooted in
"envy" epitomized "know-nothing conservatism" at its
"know-nothingest".[36] Scholar Scott Scheall called economist Terence
Hutchison "the most persistent critic of Mises's apriorism",[37]:233
starting in Hutchison's 1938 book The Significance and Basic Postulates of
Economic Theory and in later publications such as his 1981 book The Politics
and Philosophy of Economics: Marxians, Keynesians, and Austrians.[37]:242
Scheall noted that Friedrich Hayek, later in his life (after Mises died), also
expressed reservations about Mises's apriorism, such as in a 1978 interview
where Hayek said that he "never could accept the ... almost
eighteenth-century rationalism in his [Mises's]
argument".[37]:233–234 In a 1978 interview, Hayek said about Mises's
book Socialism: At first we all felt he was frightfully exaggerating and even
offensive in tone. You see, he hurt all our deepest feelings, but gradually he
won us around, although for a long time I had to – I just learned he was
usually right in his conclusions, but I was not completely satisfied with his
argument.[38] Economist Milton Friedman considered Mises inflexible in his
thinking: The story I remember best happened at the initial Mont Pelerin
meeting when he got up and said, "You're all a bunch of socialists."
We were discussing the distribution of income, and whether you should have
progressive income taxes. Some of the people there were expressing the view
that there could be a justification for it. Another occasion which is equally
telling: Fritz Machlup was a student of Mises's, one of his most faithful
disciples. At one of the Mont Pelerin meetings, Machlup gave a talk in which I
think he questioned the idea of a gold standard; he came out in favor of
floating exchange rates. Mises was so mad he wouldn't speak to Machlup for
three years. Some people had to come around and bring them together again. It's
hard to understand; you can get some understanding of it by taking into account
how people like Mises were persecuted in their lives.[39] Economist Murray
Rothbard, who studied under Mises, agreed he was uncompromising, but disputes
reports of his abrasiveness. In his words, Mises was "unbelievably sweet,
constantly finding research projects for students to do, unfailingly courteous,
and never bitter" about the discrimination he received at the hands of the
economic establishment of his time.[40] After Mises died, his widow Margit
quoted a passage that he had written about Benjamin Anderson. She said it best
described Mises's own personality: His most eminent qualities were his
inflexible honesty, his unhesitating sincerity. He never yielded. He always
freely enunciated what he considered to be true. If he had been prepared to
suppress or only to soften his criticisms of popular, but irresponsible,
policies, the most influential positions and offices would have been offered
him. But he never compromised.[41] Debates about fascism Marxists Herbert
Marcuse and Perry Anderson as well as German writer Claus-Dieter Krohn
criticized Mises for writing approvingly of Italian fascism, especially for its
suppression of leftist elements in Mises's 1927 book Liberalism.[42] In 2009,
economist J. Bradford DeLong and sociologist Richard Seymour repeated the
criticism.[43] Mises, in his 1927 book Liberalism, wrote:[44] It cannot be
denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of
dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has,
for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby
won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has
brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise
continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something
more would be a fatal error. Mises biographer Jörg Guido Hülsmann
says that critics who suggest that Mises supported fascism are
"absurd" as he notes that the full quote describes fascism as
dangerous. He notes that Mises thought it was a "fatal error" to
think that it was more than an "emergency makeshift" against the
looming threat of communism and socialism as exemplified by the Bolsheviks in
Russia and the surging communists of Germany.[6]:560 Nevertheless,
Hülsmann does mention briefly in Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism[45]
that Mises had been a card-carrying member of the Fatherland Front (Austria)
fascist party and, as Hülsmann uses the word "probably", it's
not exactly clear whether membership was mandatory for public officials and
civil servants.
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Books:
All these in the Wikipedia entry are linked to entries:
The Theory of Money and Credit (1912, enlarged US edition 1953) Full text
available Archived 2014-12-16 at the Wayback Machine.
Nation, State, and Economy (1919) Full text available. "Economic
Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" (1920) (article)
Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922, 1932, 1951)
Liberalismus (1927, 1962) Translated into English with the new title, The Free
and Prosperous Commonwealth A Critique of Interventionism (1929) Full text
available online.[46] Epistemological Problems of Economics (1933, 1960)
Epistemological Problems of Economics Memoirs (1940) Interventionism: An
Economic Analysis (1941, 1998) Omnipotent Government: The Rise of Total State
and Total War (1944) Bureaucracy (1944, 1962) Planned Chaos (1947, added to
1951 edition of Socialism) Planned Chaos Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
(1949, 1963, 1966, 1996) Planning for Freedom (1952, enlarged editions in 1962,
1974, and 1980) The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (1956) Full text
available[permanent dead link] at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Theory and
History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (1957) Full text
available. Full audiobook available. The Ultimate Foundation of Economic
Science (1962) The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science The Historical
Setting of the Austrian School of Economics (1969) The Historical Setting of
the Austrian School of Economics Notes and Recollections (1978) The Clash of
Group Interests and Other Essays (1978) On the Manipulation of Money and Credit
(1978) The Causes of the Economic Crisis, reissue Economic Policy: Thoughts for
Today and Tomorrow (1979, lectures given in 1959) Economic Policy: Thoughts for
Today and Tomorrow Money, Method, and the Market Process (1990) Money, Method,
and the Market Process Economic Freedom and Interventionism (1990) The Free
Market and Its Enemies (2004, lectures given in 1951) The Free Market and Its
Enemies Marxism Unmasked: From Delusion to Destruction (2006, lectures given in
1952) Ludwig von Mises on Money and Inflation (2010, lectures given in the
1960s)
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