Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was born on 29 September 1881 in Lemberg, Galicia (today’s Lviv), where his father, an engineer with the Austrian railways, was posted. At the University of Vienna, reading Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics turned him toward the Austrian School, and he attended the seminar of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In 1906 he received his doctorate in law.

From 1909 to 1934 he worked at the Austrian Chamber of Commerce and Industry as an economic adviser to the government, while he taught at the University of Vienna without ever being given a salaried post. His private seminar brought together young economists and philosophers from all over Europe, among them Friedrich A. Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Gottfried Haberler and Oskar Morgenstern. In 1926 he founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. In 1934 he became a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and in 1940 he emigrated to the United States. From 1945 to 1969 he taught at New York University as a visiting professor, on a salary paid until 1962 by the William Volker Fund, and he also worked with the Foundation for Economic Education.

In his first major work, The Theory of Money and Credit (Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel, 1912), he applied marginal-utility theory to money and set out the core of the Austrian theory of the business cycle. In the essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920) and in Socialism (Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 1922) he argued that without private property in the means of production no prices are formed, and rational economic calculation is therefore impossible. Liberalism (Liberalismus, 1927), A Critique of Interventionism (Kritik des Interventionismus, 1929), Omnipotent Government (1944) and Bureaucracy (1944) followed. His main work is Human Action (1949), in which he grounds the whole of economics as praxeology on the axiom that man acts purposefully; it was followed by Theory and History (1957) and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962).

He died in New York on 10 October 1973. In the United States he inspired students and admirers such as Murray N. Rothbard, Israel M. Kirzner, Hans F. Sennholz, George Reisman and Henry Hazlitt. In 1974, a year after his death, Hayek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics — according to the Mises Institute, for work that developed Mises’ theory of the business cycle. In 1982 Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.

Sources: Mises Institute — Ludwig von Mises (Murray N. Rothbard) · Econlib — Ludwig von Mises · Britannica — Ludwig von Mises · Project MUSE — The Theory of Money and Credit · Foundation for Economic Education — History · Wikipedia — Ludwig von Mises

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