Who was Ludwig von Mises?

A provincial railway town on the eastern edge of the empire

Lemberg, 1881

He was born Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises in Lemberg, in the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary, where his father was posted as a railway engineer. The city is Lviv now, and it has been in four countries since. The family moved to Vienna while he was still small, and he entered the Akademisches Gymnasium at eleven. He went up to the University of Vienna in 1900 to read law and government, and took his doctorate in 1906.

Autumn 1903

The book that changed his mind

He began as a student of the Historical School, which gathered facts and distrusted theory. Then in the autumn of 1903 he read Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics, published thirty-two years earlier, and it turned him into an economist. He went on to the seminar of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Menger’s student, and stayed until 1913.

Menger’s book was already a generation old when Mises found it. He would spend the next seventy years extending it.

1912

A first book at thirty-one

The Theory of Money and Credit argued that money was not a subject standing outside economics but part of it, its value traceable to its usefulness as a good like any other. The book earned him a lectureship at the University of Vienna the following year.

1913 to 1934

Unpaid for twenty-one years

The lectureship was a Privatdozent post, meaning he taught at the university and the university did not pay him. He drew his salary from the Vienna Chamber of Commerce instead, where he worked as an economic adviser from 1909 onward, and taught on the side. The title of associate professor came in 1918. It was also unpaid.

He held no salaried academic position in Vienna for his entire career there. Twenty-one years, no chair.

The 1920s

The seminar in the chamber offices

Twice a month he ran a private seminar out of his office at the Chamber of Commerce. It was not a university course, there was no credit, and nobody was paid. The people who came included Friedrich Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Gottfried Haberler, Oskar Morgenstern, Alfred Schütz, Felix Kaufmann, and Eric Voegelin. Between them they would go on to shape economics, sociology, statistics, and political philosophy for the rest of the century.

A room borrowed from a day job produced more consequential economists than most universities manage in a hundred years.

1920 and 1922

The argument with everyone

In 1920 he published the argument that a socialist economy cannot plan rationally, because without market prices it has no way to compare one use of a resource with another. In 1922 he expanded it into Socialism. The debate it started ran for seventy years and was, in the end, decided outside the seminar rooms.

1934

A paid post at last, and a reason to take it

At fifty-two he was offered a chair at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. It was the first salaried academic position of his life. He accepted immediately, and the timing mattered more than the salary: he was a Jewish liberal in a country sliding toward the Nazis, and he had spent a decade arguing publicly against them. In 1938, after a twelve-year engagement, he married Margit Sereny in Geneva.

July 1940

Leaving, at fifty-eight

He left Geneva in July 1940 to avoid being taken by the German armies or handed to them by the Swiss. He sailed for New York and arrived at fifty-eight, having left behind his library, his notes, and a well-paid chair. His Vienna apartment had already been searched by the Gestapo two years earlier.

He began again, in a new language and a new country, at an age when most academics are counting toward retirement.

1940 to 1969

Beginning again

He never held a full-time position at an American university. From 1945 he taught as a visiting professor at New York University, and he stayed for twenty-four years, retiring in 1969 at eighty-eight. His seminar there drew a second generation, Murray Rothbard and Israel Kirzner among them. In 1949 he published Human Action, the full statement of the system, written in his third language.

He died in New York in 1973, aged ninety-two

What he left

Fifteen major books across sixty-seven years, and a way of doing economics that begins with a person choosing something. He was never fashionable and was for long stretches ignored. The Institute in Auburn was founded nine years after his death to carry the work on, and everything he wrote is on this site, complete and free.