Portrait: Ludwig von Mises, Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and sociologist

Wednesday, 25 May 2022 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination:
Category/Kategorie: Portrait
Reading Time:  8 minutes

© Krapulat/cc-by-sa-4.0

© Krapulat/cc-by-sa-4.0

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises 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 studies comparing communism and capitalism. He is considered one of the most influential economic and political thinkers of the 20th century. Mises emigrated from Austria to the United States in 1940. 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. Mises’s Private Seminar was a leading group of economists. 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.

In the years from 1904 to 1914, Mises attended lectures given by Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. 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. Mises was chief economist for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce and was an economic adviser of Engelbert Dollfuss, the austrofascist Austrian Chancellor. 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). 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.

In 1940, Mises and his wife fled the German advance in Europe and emigrated to New York City in the United States. 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. 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. Businessman and libertarian commentator Lawrence Fertig, a member of the New York University Board of Trustees, funded Mises and his work. 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. 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 at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C.. Mises retired from teaching at the age of 87 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. The personal library of Mises was given to Hillsdale College as bequeathed in his will. 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.

© Krapulat/cc-by-sa-4.0 © Ludwig von Mises Institute/cc-by-sa-3.0
<
>
© Ludwig von Mises Institute/cc-by-sa-3.0
Mises wrote and lectured extensively on behalf of classical liberalism. 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 and was an anti-imperialist. 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.”

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. 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. 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. He wrote that “rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth“.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. 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”. 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.

Read more on Mises Institute and Wikipedia Ludwig von Mises (Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State - Weather report by weather.com - Global Passport Power Rank - Travel Risk Map - Democracy Index - GDP according to IMF, UN, and World Bank - Global Competitiveness Report - Corruption Perceptions Index - Press Freedom Index - World Justice Project - Rule of Law Index - UN Human Development Index - Global Peace Index - Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index). Photos by Wikimedia Commons. If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at comment@wingsch.net. Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.




Recommended posts:

Share this post: (Please note data protection regulations before using buttons)

Grenoble, capital of the Alpes

Grenoble, capital of the Alpes

[caption id="attachment_160479" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Palace of the Parliament of Dauphiné © Milky[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Grenoble is a city in southeastern France, situated at the foot of the French Alps where the riv...

[ read more ]

Erfurt, Thuringia's capital

Erfurt, Thuringia's capital

[caption id="attachment_160561" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Haus 'Zum breiten Herd' and Guild Hall on Fish Market © TomKidd[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Erfurt is the capital city of Thuringia and the main city nearest to the geogr...

[ read more ]

The Mediterranean island of Capri

The Mediterranean island of Capri

[caption id="attachment_153532" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Capri Harbour © Sean William[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Capri is an Italian island in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of N...

[ read more ]

Theme Week Auvergne - Issoire

Theme Week Auvergne - Issoire

[caption id="attachment_236071" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Town Hall © Krzysztof Golik/cc-by-sa-4.0[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Issoire is a commune in the Puy-de-Dôme department in Auvergne in central France. Issoire is located...

[ read more ]

Portrait: Douglas Tompkins, environmental activist and eco-entrepreneur

Portrait: Douglas Tompkins, environmental activist and eco-entrepreneur

[caption id="attachment_535" align="alignleft" width="220" caption="DouglasTompkins © LatinTrade.com"][/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]From time to time we portrait people with exceptional CV’s who try to make the world a better place wi...

[ read more ]

The City of Melbourne

The City of Melbourne

[caption id="attachment_154144" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Crown Casino Complex & Melbourne Exhibition Building © Donaldytong[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victori...

[ read more ]

Theme Week Cyclades - Milos

Theme Week Cyclades - Milos

[caption id="attachment_153477" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Klima village © Kosant38[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Milos is a volcanic Greek island in the Aegean Sea, just north of the Sea of Crete. Milos is the southwesternmost isl...

[ read more ]

Theme Week Catalonia - Badalona

Theme Week Catalonia - Badalona

[caption id="attachment_151298" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Port of Badalona © Vicente Maza Gómez/cc-by-sa-3.0[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Badalona is a city in eastern Catalonia. It is located in the comarca of the Barcelonès, ...

[ read more ]

Jewish life in the historic center of Berlin, around the Oranienburger Straße, Rosenthaler Straße and the Scheunenviertel

Jewish life in the historic center of Berlin, around the Oranienburger Straße, Rosenthaler Straße and the Scheunenviertel

[caption id="attachment_196740" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Oranienburger Straße and New Synagogue © Rohieb/cc-by-sa-3.0[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Oranienburger Straße is a street in central Berlin. It is located in the boroug...

[ read more ]

Theme Week Dubai - Burj al Arab

Theme Week Dubai - Burj al Arab

[caption id="attachment_25305" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Burj Al Arab and 360 degree club © Titoni Thomas/cc-by-sa-3.0-en[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]Burj Al Arab (Tower of the Arabs) is a luxury hotel located in Dubai. At 321 m...

[ read more ]

Helsinki Senate Square

Helsinki Senate Square

[caption id="attachment_207617" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Senate Square with Alexander statue and Helsinki Cathedral © Bahnfrend/cc-by-sa-4.0[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]The Senate Square presents Carl Ludvig Engel's architectur...

[ read more ]

Jost Van Dyke

Jost Van Dyke

[caption id="attachment_153622" align="aligncenter" width="590"] Jost Van Dyke - White Bay © Cemerp/cc-by-3.0[/caption][responsivevoice_button voice="UK English Female" buttontext="Listen to this Post"]At roughly 8 square kilometers, and about 3 square miles Jost Van Dyke is the smallest of the fou...

[ read more ]

Return to TopReturn to Top