The Grünberg Seminar

The university seminars gathered smaller groups of students around a professor who directed their reading and research in his field of expertise. Mises profited in particular from his participation in the seminar of Carl Grünberg, a young and energetic professor who had just received a full professorship at the department.¹⁰

Grünberg knew what he could expect of the brilliant members of his seminar and encouraged even first-year students to do publishable research under his guidance. After only one semester, he assigned Mises a research project on the Galician peasants' liberation movement from 1772 to 1848. Mises started the work shortly after Easter 1901 and within a year produced a comprehensive study on the subject. He had spent several months in the Vienna Staatsarchiv researching all available literature on the evolution of the legal status of Galician peasants, on the reforms enacted by Emperor Joseph II, and on the events leading to the revolution of 1848. His meticulous notes filled several hundred handwritten pages from which he eventually distilled a manuscript. His work was published immediately, under the innocent title “The Development of the Relationship Between Lords and Peasants in Galicia, 1772–1848,” in the department's prestigious series, Vienna Studies in Government Science.¹¹

The subject of peasant liberation drew much attention due to the widely acclaimed research of Georg F. Knapp into the causes and consequences of the liberation of Prussian peasants, which had resulted from various agrarian reforms starting in the eighteenth century.¹² Knapp's research essentially relied on archival evidence. His approach soon found disciples in the German scholars Ludwig and Wittich, who further extended and reinforced his analysis of German conditions. Knapp's approach was later applied to Austria, most notably in the work of Carl Grünberg, Die Bauernbefreiung in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien (Peasant Liberation in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia).¹³ It was this work that brought Grünberg to the University of Vienna, where he set out to train his students in questions of Austrian peasants' liberation and especially encouraged them to research with him the conditions of those parts of the empire which he had not himself covered. Grünberg then produced another volume on agrarian reforms in the Bukovina, which was complemented by Mises's work on peasants' liberation in Galicia.¹⁴

Carl Grünberg

In his general exposition Mises closely followed his teacher. He made exhaustive use of the literature in Polish and German that was available in the largest Austrian archive, where he had unearthed hitherto unknown material. He could be proud of the result and congratulate himself on having landed, at the age of twenty, a first scholarly publication in a highly respected series. But he later recalled:

[C]arl Grünberg had worked for a while with professor Knapp in Strasbourg.... His work slavishly followed in form, presentation, and method, Knapp's book on the old provinces of Prussia. It was neither economic history nor administrative history. It was merely an extract from government documents, a description of policy as found in government reports. Any able government official could easily have written it.

It was Professor Grünberg's ambition to found in Vienna a center for economic history like that created by Knapp in Strasbourg.... As far as possible, I endeavored to free myself from too close an association with Knapp's system. But I succeeded only in part, which made my study, published in 1902, more a history of government measures than economic history.¹⁵

In the introduction of the book, Mises describes the evolution of the condition of Galician peasants from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century. In the late Middle Ages, he points out, the Galician peasants had a comparatively favorable lot. They paid low taxes to their lords, could not be coercively removed from their land, often enjoyed autonomous jurisdiction, and even had a limited right to leave the country. The lords were not interested in agriculture and left the management of all farming affairs to the discretion of the peasants and their representatives.

Things began to change drastically after two consecutive Polish victories against the German Order, which had ruled large parts of the East Baltic in the fifteenth century. After 1466, the Poles controlled the ports of Danzig, Memel, and Elbing, and as a consequence export of agricultural products of the Polish hinterland became more profitable. The local aristocracy tried to gain ever more control over agricultural production and in particular over the work force of their peasants. These attempts proved to be very successful: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Polish aristocracy in Galicia controlled all lands, and the Galician peasant was the slave of his lord, destitute of any rights, liable to be sold or traded away.

Mises analyzed the state of affairs prevailing in the early eighteenth century in his first chapter. He explained that the Polish aristocracy was essentially a club of slaveholders with no backing in the wider population. This was a major reason why they were unable to avoid partitioning of the country (1772 to 1795) and could not re-establish its independence thereafter. Ruthenian slave-peasants liable to come under Prussian or Austrian dominion had nothing to lose; they could only expect an improvement in their situation.¹⁶

The new rulers in Vienna were keen enough to realize the political opportunity in this state of affairs. “The policies of the Austrian government in Galicia,” Mises wrote, “had the objective of benefiting the peasant class at the expense of the nobility.”¹⁷ This tendency was further reinforced by the adherence of Emperor Joseph II to the ideals of Enlightenment liberalism. After Galicia's annexation to Austria, taxes were reduced, legal protection for peasants established, and the property rights of lords and peasants were now more clearly distinguished. Most importantly, slavery received a fatal blow. The peasants were no longer considered the property of their lords, but they were still forced to work a certain number of hours—a duty called Robot, originally established by Empress Maria Theresa.

But Joseph II died in February 1790, before his vast program of social reform could be brought to completion. The reforms had failed to specify the rights and duties of all parties; in particular, that the peasants were no longer forced to complete certain types of tasks, but merely to work a certain number of hours. The result was sloppy work and a sharp decline in productivity. The aristocracy then resorted to stronger punishments, which further poisoned social relations. In the first four decades of the nineteenth century, democratic agitators believed Galicia to be fertile ground for their activities, because the rural population seemed to be ripe for revolution. Mises argued that the great majority of the peasants did not trust these agitators any more than they trusted the local aristocracy. They did trust the emperor and believed him to have abolished the Robot, despite what the Polish aristocrats said. When in February 1846 the aristocrats rebelled against Austria in an attempt to restore their ancient privileges, they confronted a united rural peasantry, which smashed this rebellion without any assistance from the Austrian army.¹⁸

Mises gave a detailed account of this failed aristocratic rebellion and of its consequences in his fourth chapter. He had many things to say on the issue. After all, his great-grandfather had been an eyewitness to the event and had welcomed the peasants' success.

The victorious peasants believed they had now earned both liberty and imperial recognition. But the government in Vienna was not ready for Galician peasant liberty and feared its repercussions in other parts of the empire, where forced labor still existed. When a law was passed in December 1846 that essentially preserved the status quo, the Galician peasants felt betrayed. They were now ready for the revolution of 1848, which eventually succeeded in abolishing the Robot, root and branch.

Although presented as a work of purely historic interest, Mises's research touched important political sensibilities of the day. For the gist of the Knapp-Grünberg-Mises argument was that slavery was the typical condition of peasants under a Slavic regime, and that serious attempts at their liberation were begun only under Germanic rulers. Mises argued that the various Polish rebellions following the 1772 partition failed because they were not genuine national upheavals, but purely aristocratic ventures that antagonized both the imperial central government in Vienna and the local population. Because the democratic movement did not find support within the rural working classes, its leadership allied itself to the higher aristocracy, thus supporting the political status quo. In Mises's words:

How [the peasants'] eyes shone when they heard talk of a better, more beautiful future; one in which there would be no more lords and servants, and all would be brothers. But what they took away from the words of the [democratic] insurgents fueled yet further their hatred of the aristocracy. They did not wish to hear about the reestablishment of the Polish state. What was Poland to them? Whether it was Polish or German met with their indifference. But they did know that the Austrian civil servants provided their only help against the oppressive landlords. The injustice once suffered by the peasants was still alive in the memory of the older people, and thanks to the intervention of the Kaiser, it no longer had to be endured. But because their oppressors were Polish, they felt only disdain for all “Polish” things. They now called themselves “kaiserlich” [Imperial] and “Austrian.”¹⁹

Mises's conclusions were unwelcome among Poles and other Slavic nationals, especially in early twentieth century Vienna's heated climate of ethnic sensibilities. How much these questions of apparently mere academic interest were fought over can be gathered from the fact that in the very same year in which Mises's study appeared, a young Polish historian had published a dissertation in which he claimed the exact opposite—that the condition of the eighteenth-century Polish peasants was significantly better than that of peasants living under German rule.²⁰

Mises's research also had personal resonance for him. It presented his compatriots, who had shrugged off the aristocratic rebellion, as freedom fighters and, hence, as motors of the “historic” trend toward liberty in Galicia.

Mises's work was positively reviewed by one of the main authorities in the field, Knapp's disciple Ludwig from the University of Strasbourg, who called it a model study and praised the clarity of Mises's style, which he seemed to have inherited from his teacher Grünberg.²¹ A review in the principal organ of the German socialists of the chair, Schmoller's Jahrbuch, said that the study contained much new material, and that it was an extremely sound and informative work.²² Another expert, Professor R.F. Kaindl from the University of Czernowitz praised Grünberg for his brilliant student, mentioning especially Mises's thorough analysis—“from the generally higher standpoint”—of the material available in the Vienna Staatsarchiv on the Galician reforms that were implemented during the reign of Joseph II.²³

On July 15, 1902, Mises completed the initial phase of his studies by passing the first Staatsexamen on the history of law. His examiners focused particularly on the history of the Austrian Empire; Mises passed with distinction and the twenty-year-old seemed headed for a brilliant career in academia. Before entering the second phase of studies, however, he had to fulfill his military obligations.