18. Émigré in New York

MISES KNEW THAT IT would be hard for him to find a suitable position in the United States—fortunately he had no idea just how hard. He was thoroughly out of step with positivism or, as he called it, pan-physicalism, which had begun to shape the development of American economics during the past two decades, and which at the very moment he arrived on American shores, was being promoted with large grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. And his political views were of course also highly unfashionable. In the land of the free—the very cradle of radical laissez-faire policies—the philosophy of the founding fathers of the American republic was all but dead in 1940. A few years later, one correspondent summed up the situation:

Dickens, Carlyle, Coleridge, Charles Kingsley, Charlotte Brontë, Byron, Hood (The Song of the Shirt), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a host of others are still remembered and read today by millions, while the works of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, McCulloch, and Mill lie undusted except by scholars.¹

The contemporary American intellectual world was deeply anti-capitalistic. How could a man like Mises integrate himself into such an environment?