Book Review: Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero by Murray N. Rothbard
The Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn University. Auburn, Alabama 36849 • 1988 • 87 pp., $8.00 paperback. Also available from The Foundation for Economic Education.
The great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, died in 1973. A generation of young students has come of age since then. These new students know Mises only by name and through his reputation as an advocate of free markets. Although they could not know Mises personally, they are fortunate in having available a growing volume of literature about him and the economic theories he expounded.
Several books have been written about Mises’ life—for instance, his own Notes and Recollections (published posthumously in 1978) and his widow’s My Years with Ludwig von Mises (1976 and 1984). The Essential von Mises (1973) by Professor Murray N. Rothbard, reprinted in the 4th edition of Mises’ Planning for Freedom (1980), gives a brief introduction to the man and his work. But now this new booklet, also by Professor Rothbard, gives an excellent, slightly longer, overview of the high points in Professor Mises’ life and of his major contributions to economics.
For several years, when Rothbard was working for his doctorate at Columbia University, he was an active participant in Mises’ graduate seminar at New York University. He knew Mises well. And he understands the economics Mises taught as few others do.
In this booklet, Rothbard tells of Mises’ early life in Austria and of his career as a teacher and as an economic adviser to the Austrian government. He describes two of Mises’ major books published during those years—The Theory of Money and Credit (1912) and Socialism (1922). Rothbard tells about Mises’ private seminar, attended by such notables as F. A. Hayek, and he discusses Mises’ straggles in Vienna against inflationists, socialists, and communists.
When Mises realized that the situation in Austria was hopeless, he left his native country for Switzerland. There he spent several years(1934-1940) teaching and writing. Among other works, he wrote a weighty and important economic treatise, Nationaloekonomie, which was published in 1940. Hitler was then riding high in Europe. Few readers of German were in a position to study the economic theory of free markets at that time, so the sales of Mises’ books were disappointing.
To escape the catastrophe in Europe, Mises left Switzerland. He arrived in the United States in 1940 with his wife and immediately began to carve out a new career for himself, lecturing and writing in English. In the remaining three decades of his life, he wrote six books, including his magnum opus, Human Action, a complete rewrite in English of his ill-fated Nationaloekonomie. He also wrote several monographs and many articles.
In this booklet, Rothbard briefly explains Mises’ epistemology—the fundamental principles from which Mises reasoned. Rothbard also summarizes Mises’ most important contributions to the theory of money and banking, the causes of the business “cycle,” and the reasons why economic calculation is impossible under socialism.
Mises’ understanding of the consequences of government intervention made him a pessimist for most of his life. Yet he never gave up. He met every danger, Rothbard writes, with “magnificent courage . . . no matter how desperate the circumstance.” Whether he was battling inflation, socialism, government intervention, or Nazism, “Ludwig von Mises carried the fight forward, and deepened and expanded his great contributions to economics and to all the disciplines of human action.”
Rothbard gives the reader a good, if abbreviated, introduction to Ludwig von Mises, his life, his character, and his work. This booklet will interest both the novice and the serious scholar. []
Mrs. Greaves is a member of the senior staff of The Foundation for Economic Education. From 1951 to 1969 she was a regular participant in Ludwig von Mises’ graduate seminar in economic theory at New York University.
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