~ 1881 to 1973

One of the most important economists and political scientists of the 20th Century, Ludwig von Mises was a key figure (possibly the key figure) in the Marginalist or "Austrian" school of economics, which advocates a return to classical liberalism – laissez-faire capitalism, and small constitutional democratic government.

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was born in the Galician city of Lemden (now Lv'iv, Ukraine, also the birthplace of Stanislaw Lem), on September 29, 1881. This was the same year his great-grandfather, Mayer Rachmiel Mises, was ennobled by Austria-Hungary's Emperor Franz Josef II, thus entitling his family to the "von" name prefix. Ludwig was the oldest child of Arthur Edler von Mises, a construction engineer for the Austrian Railroad Ministry, and Adele von Mises (née Landau); he had a brother who died in childhood, and another, Richard von Mises, who became a mathematician and made important contributions to the theory of the complexity of information.

For generations the Miseses, of Jewish descent, had been bankers and merchants of some renown. Ludwig continued this family tradition after his graduation from Vienna's Akademishe Gymnasium in 1900 by registering at the Universität Wien (University of Vienna) at the age of 19. There, he studied law (as there was no separate field of economics at that time) under Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school of economics, and Austrian finance minister Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. This was a formative time for Mises, and he absorbed the theory of classical liberalism or, as it would later come to be known, laissez-faire capitalism, from its most prolific living defenders. During this time he wrote his first monograph, a historical study entitled Die Entwicklung des gutsherrlich-bäuerlichen Verhältnisses in Galizien (1772-1848) ("The Development of the Relationship between Peasant and the Lord of the Manor in Galicia (1772-1848)").

On February 10, 1906, at the age of 27, Mises was awarded the Dr. Jur., Doctorate of Roman and Canonical Law, by the University of Vienna. Starting that year, he taught economics to seniors at a girl's high school, and in 1907 he also began work at the Handelskammer, the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, as a government advisor. He also began work on Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (Theory of Money and Credit), his first major work in which he draws a functional comparison between the "purchasing power" of a currency and the price of a commodity, an innovative move in a world in which currency was studied as a separate phenomenon from supply and demand. This had grave implications on the way people understood inflation and how to combat it. This book was published in 1912, when Mises was 31, by which time he had also served his compulsory military reserves service.

Though having a certain renown, Mises's opinions were unfashionable and considered outdated. He was awarded a prestigious but unsalaried position as Privatdozent (lecturer) at the University of Vienna in 1913. If he was poorly received in liberal pre-War Austria, he would be even more poorly received in inter-War welfare state Austria. In 1914, World War I broke out, and Mises was recalled to the army. First he served for three years as a captain with the artillery division of the cavalry, and then later worked for one year on finance and economics intelligence problems with the General Staff. From 1918 to 1919, he worked with the Viennese Export Academy and the Institute for World Trade, helping to reintegrate vets into society, and also served as Director of the Austrian Reparations Commission of the League of Nations.

After the War he returned to work at the Handelskammer and to his responsibilities (and lack of pay) as Privatdozent, now with the honorary title "Professor Extraordinary." He also revived the Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft ("Economics Society"). During this time, Mises played a pivotal role in preventing Austria from following Germany into a disastrous cycle of inflation during the '20s. In 1927 he also hired Friedrich August von Hayek, later to become a Nobel Prize winner for his work in economics, as the first Director of the Oesterreichisches Institut für Konjunkturforschung (Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research), of which Mises was founder and Acting Vice President. In 1934 he took a job as a Professor of International Economic Relations at l'Institut Universitaire des Hautes Études Internationales in Geneva, though he retained his association with the Handelskammer until Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938.

During this time, he witnessed growing interest in his work, and so began writing heavily. In 1919, Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft: Beiträge zur Politik and Geschichte der Zeit (Nation, State, and Economy) was published. In 1922, he released Die Gemeinwirtshaft: Untersitchungen über den Sozialismus (Socialism), in which he mounted an extended critique against Communism and its academic apologetics. In 1927, Liberalismus (first translated as The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth) was published. In 1933 he wrote Grundprobleme der Nationalökonomie (Epistemological Problems of Economics). He also wrote Nationalökonomie: Theorie des Handelns und Wirtschaftens, which would form the basis of his later work, Human Action.

In 1938 he married Margit Sereny (née Herzfeld) in Geneva – after warning her that, in the words of the Mises Institute, "while he would write much about money, he would never have much of it" – and in 1940 they migrated to the United States. Under grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and and from the National Bureau of Economic Research, he wrote two books, both of which were published in 1944: Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War, and Bureaucracy, which was meant to be a warning against the growing pecuniary powers of the US Federal Government. At first denied a job in the States, in 1945, with the help of Henry Hazlitt and Henry Fertig, he managed to get a post as Visiting Professor at New York University's Graduate School of Business Administration, though he received no salary there and lived on the patronage of businesspeople and foundations; the dean even discouraged students from taking him seriously. Mises also worked for two summers teaching economics at the Escuela de Economía del Associación Mexicana de Cultura (School of Economics of the Mexican Cultural Association). During this time he wrote Planned Chaos (1947), which would later be reworked as the epilogue to the American edition of Socialism, and above all, his magnum opus Human Action, published in 1949.

Mises kept teaching, writing, and editing until his retirement in 1969 at the age of 87, at which time he was the oldest active professor in the country. Throughout the sixties he also continued to amass many honorary awards: in 1962 he was awarded the Österreichisches Ehrenzeichen für Wissenschaft und Kunst (Austrian Medal of Honour for Science and the Arts); in 1963 an honorary Doctorate of Laws degree by NYU; in 1964 an honorary Doctor Rerum Politicarum degree by the University of Freiburg in Germany; and in 1969 he was named "Distinguished Fellow of the Year" by the American Economic Association.

Ludwig von Mises passed away at New York City's St. Vincent's Hospital on October 10, 1973, at the age of 92.

Unlike many advocates of classical liberalism, Mises was very careful about making moral arguments, feeling that they cannot be proven or disproven, and preferring to stick to scientific statements about the practical implications of certain social arrangements. He was not "conservative" in the strict sense of that term, unlike libertarians like Murray Rothbard. Though he's often used by libertarians and Objectivists as part of an extended casuistric argument, Mises believed that values were subjective – relative to the constitution of the subject – and made this the basis of his political and economic program. His writing is very direct and to the point, and he is very careful to anticipate counter-arguments and incorporate them without disrupting the flow of his own argument. On the whole, Mises is a very sophisticated writer and thinker.

Today, many of Mises's books in various editions can be found in school libraries, or can be ordered on-line. The Mises Institute, which was chaired by his wife until her death in 1993, keeps eleven of Mises's twenty-five books in PDF form and distributes them for free from www.mises.org, and also publishes an exceedingly elegant authoritative printed edition of Human Action.

http://www.mises.org/mises.asp