Preface

IN THE SUMMER OF 1940, with Hitler's troops moving through France to encircle Switzerland, Ludwig von Mises sat beside his wife Margit on a bus filled with Jews fleeing Europe. To avoid capture, the bus driver took back roads through the French countryside, stopping to ask locals if the Germans had been spotted ahead—reversing and finding alternative routes if they had been.

Mises was two months shy of his fifty-ninth birthday. He was on the invaders' list of wanted men. Two years earlier, they had ransacked his Vienna apartment, confiscating his records, and freezing his assets. Mises then hoped to be safe in Geneva. Now nowhere in Europe seemed safe. Not only was he a prominent intellectual of Jewish descent; he was widely known to be an archenemy of National Socialism and of every other form of socialism. Some called him “the last knight of liberalism.”

He had personally steered Austria away from Bolshevism, saved his country from the level of hyperinflation that destroyed interwar Germany, and convinced a generation of young socialist intellectuals to embrace the market. Now he was a political refugee headed for a foreign continent.

The couple arrived in the United States with barely any money and no prospects for income. Mises's former students and disciples had found prestigious positions in British and American universities (often with his help), but Mises himself was considered an anachronism. In an age of growing government and central planning, he was a defender of private property and an opponent of all government intervention in the economy. Perhaps worst of all, he was a proponent of verbal logic and realism in the beginning heyday of positivism and mathematical modeling. No university would have him. Margit began to train as a secretary.

Over the next decade, they would slowly rebuild and Mises would find new allies. He would also publish his most important book, Human Action. It would earn him a following whose admiration and devotion were beyond anything he had known in Europe.

When he died in October 1973, he had only a small circle of admirers and disciples, but this group became the nucleus of a movement that has grown exponentially. Today his writings inspire economists and libertarians throughout the world, and are avidly read by an increasing number of students in all the social sciences. There is an entire school of “Misesian” economists flourishing most notably in the United States, but also in Spain, France, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Romania, and Italy. This movement is testimony to the lasting power and impact of his ideas.

The purpose of the present book is to tell the story of how these ideas emerged in their time. It is the story of an amazing economist, of his life and deeds. It is the story of his personal impact on the Austrian School and the libertarian movement. It is above all the story of a man who transformed himself in an uncompromising pursuit of the truth, of a man who adopted his ideas step-by-step, often against his initial inclinations.

Once a student of the historical method in the social sciences, he would become the dean of the opposition Austrian School and humanistic social theory. He went from left-leaning young idealist in Vienna to grand old man of the American Right. Dismissive of “the metallists” early in his career, he became an unwavering spokesman for a 100 percent gold standard. His example inspired students and followers, many of whom would take his message and method farther than he himself would go.

The portrait of Ludwig von Mises offered here is primarily concerned with his intellectual development in the context of his time. Not much is known about the emotional layer of his personality. Early on he conceived of himself as a public persona: Professor Mises. He took great care to destroy any evidence—from receipts to love letters—anything that could have been useful to potential opponents. We can report on some of the more intimate episodes of his life only because of the private records stolen from his Vienna apartment by Hitler's agents in March of 1938. These documents eventually fell into the hands of the Red Army, were rediscovered in a secret Moscow archive in 1991, and have been for us a precious source of information.

The present book is squarely based on Mises's personal documents in the Moscow archive and in the archive at Grove City College. I have also used relevant documents available from the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna, the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, as well as the materials that Mrs. Bettina Bien Greaves has inherited from the Mises estate. It goes without saying that I have studied Mises's writings in great detail, as well as those of the most significant other economists of his time. Furthermore, I have tried to familiarize myself with the historical context of his work, although remaining an amateur on these general questions. All this material is brought together here for the first time. I hope it will be a useful starting point for future research on Mises.

This brings me to a final remark on the scope and purpose of this book. Though I never met Mises in person, I have been a student and admirer of his works for many years. The following pages are last but not least a token of my gratitude toward this great thinker. In my economic research, I have tried to go on where he had left off, though not necessarily in the direction he seemed to be taking. This raised a few basic questions for my work on this biography: Should I talk about the research that Mises has inspired in our day? Should I discuss the sometimes different interpretations of Mises that are now current? It might have enhanced the present work and been more interesting to the present-day experts in the field to have included critical annotations on the literature, and there are many, but I decided to refrain from this. It would have drawn me away from speaking about Mises himself and into speaking about the literature on Mises. To keep a book that is already rather voluminous focused on its main subject, it was necessary to minimize the discussion of the secondary literature, including not only my own works, but also the works of eminent Mises scholars such as Murray Rothbard, Richard Ebeling, Israel Kirzner, Joseph Salerno, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Bettina Bien Greaves, Julian DelGaudio, Eamonn Butler, Patrick Gunning, Jeffrey Herbener, Percy Greaves, Hans Sennholz, Ralph Raico, James Rolph Edwards, Laurence Moss, Gary North, Carsten Pallas, and David Gordon. This is an inconvenience, but an acceptable one in the age of the Internet.

The main point of a Mises biography in our present day, when so little is known about the man and biographical research is still in its infancy, is to come to grips with a figure who, without any significant institutional backing, by the sheer power of his ideas, inspires, more than thirty years after his death, a growing international intellectual movement. What are these ideas that have such magnetic power? Who was this man? What were his aims, his struggles, his triumphs, his defeats? How did his ideas originate in the context of his time and against the odds he faced? These, I think, are the main questions at the present stage. Those who love ideas—especially those who believe that ideas shape our world— may find the following pages worthwhile reading. If it does no more than raise further interest in Ludwig von Mises and his work, this book will have attained its goal.

Jörg Guido Hülsmann
Angers, France
May 2007