The life and works of Ludwig von Mises.

• Author: Ebeling, Richard M.
• Position: Biography

Ludwig von Mises ( 18 81 - 19 7 3) was one of the most important economists of the twentieth century. Even if he had made no other contribution over a professional lifetime that spanned seven decades, his place in the history of economic ideas would be assured by his devastating analysis of why socialist central planning is inherently "impossible." Besides this achievement, however, he also formulated a monetary theory of the business cycle that at one point in the 1930s rivaled even the emerging Keynesian Revolution for attention.

In addition, Mises was a leading contributor to the philosophy of the social sciences, building on the legacy of the classical economists, the early Austrian school, Max Weber's sociology of meaningful action, and the "intentionalist" tradition in continental philosophy. His major economic treatise Human Action ([1949] 1996a) is a work in the grand style of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers. It lays before the reader not only a thorough analysis of the logic of human decision making and the market process, but also a theory of society and the social order with all of its philosophical, sociological, economic, and political dimensions. Though "Renaissance man" is a much misused and abused appellation, it may rightly be said that the breadth and depth of Mises's writings marked him truly as such a man even in an age of growing scientific specialization.

Finally, through his writings, teaching, and personal contacts, Mises cultivated new generations of both Austrian economists and classical liberals, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, if not for Mises's influence on a significant number of European and American scholars, writers, and even policymakers, the vision and the ideal of the liberal free-market order might have been lost in the dark decades of totalitarian collectivism and the rise of the interventionist welfare state. It is doubtful that a vibrant and growing Austrian school of economics would now exist if not for Mises's relocation to the United States, where he made a great personal and literary impact on a number of American scholars during the years of Keynesian domination in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although a number of his former students have pointed out that Mises was neither a great orator nor an especially dynamic speaker in the classroom, he fostered a deep devotion and following among groups of people beyond professional economists. Long before he came to the United States during World War II, this effect often irritated his critics, who sometimes referred rudely to a "cult" that had formed around him. (1)

In spite of this major influence on "Austrian" and classical-liberal thought, very few studies have been devoted to Mises's life and contributions, and, until recently, no detailed intellectual biography of the man and his ideas existed. (2) This scant attention stands in contrast to that devoted to the other twentieth-century giant of the Austrian school and classical liberalism, Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992). Indeed, in the decades that have followed Hayek's receiving the Nobel Prize in 1974, an intellectual "cottage industry" has grown up as writers across the political spectrum have devoted themselves to analyzing his ideas. Yet more than once Hayek pointed out that virtually all of his own contributions to monetary and business-cycle theory, his critique of socialism and planning, his analysis of competition and the market process, and his critical studies of scientism, positivism, and historicism were all deeply influenced, if not directly inspired, by Mises's earlier writings in every one of these areas of research.

The lack of an intellectual biography of Mises has reflected in part the paucity of knowledge about Mises the man. He was an extremely private individual who shared little about his personal life. His memoir Notes and Recollections ([1940] 1978), which was written in the autumn of 1940, shortly after he arrived in the United States, and not published until 1978, tells very little about his intellectual development or his family history. It is very far from what is normally considered an autobiography. He did not keep a diary, and his letters to people were more often short essays on political and economic affairs than correspondence in which he shared with others the circumstances of his life. His wife, Margit, wrote her own recollection, My Years with Ludwig von Mises ([1976] 1984) not long after he passed away, but it does little to fill the gap.

Much of the material on which a full biography might have been based appeared to have been lost during World War II. Shortly after the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938, the Gestapo went to what had been Mises's apartment in Vienna and seized all of his papers, documents, manuscripts, correspondence, and other materials relating to his family and personal life. Mises later believed that all of these materials had been destroyed during the war. By a strange twist of fate, however, they actually survived the war and ended up in a secret Soviet archive in Moscow, where they remained unknown to anyone in the West until the 1990s. Copies of these "lost papers" now reside in several locations in the United States. (3)

These papers serve as a critical source for the story that Jorg Guido Hulsmann tells in his recent biography Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007). In a text of more than one thousand printed pages, Hulsmann traverses the entire span of Mises's life, from the twilight years of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late nineteenth century, to the traumas and events of the two world wars, and then to Mises's "second life" in the United States from 1940 until his death in 1973.

A monumental effort has clearly gone into this study. At every stage, Hulsmann tries to explain, often in great detail, the historical milieu in which Mises was working and writing during each phase of his life. The author's fluency in all of the relevant languages has assured that practically everything that occurred in Mises's life has been incorporated into the narrative. Almost eight hundred of the one thousand pages focus on his years in Europe, and most readers probably will find this part of the story to be the most fascinating.

Those who are familiar with Mises through his voluminous writings may think of him most often as the grand "armchair theorist," as the great analytical "systems builder" who explained capitalism and...