Happy Birthday, Ludwig von Mises!

Brian Doherty | September 29, 2009

On this date 128 years ago was born the great economist and political thinker Ludwig von Mises, the fountainhead of modern libertarianism in the American style (not only for the quality and breadth of his own work, but for his direct influence on almost every other major American libertarian giant--everyone from Hayek to Rand to Rothbard learned their take on economics from him), though he himself was born Austrian.

You can find him being lauded across the Web today, for good reasons, but here's a compact one I particularly enjoyed from Steven Horwitz at the "Austrian Economists" blog. An excerpt:

Ludwig von Mises was one of the 20th century's most important intellectuals and one of its most passionate defenders of freedom.  He is the economics equivalent of the giants of all the other disciplines (e.g., Einstein).  And as Mario Rizzo notes over at ThinkMarkets, he is responsible for what is probably the most important single economic idea of the last century:  rational economic calculation is impossible under socialism, and attempts to put such a system in place will only impoverish the citizenry....

In a just world, college students would be reading Mises with the same frequency and breadth as they now read Marx.  After all Marxism as a political-economic system is dead, thanks to Mises and others, so if there were any justice...

Despite the impression that sometimes comes in my own work and that of other so-called "GMU Austrians" that it's all about Hayek, it isn't.  There would be no Hayek without Mises and there would be no Austrian economics as we know it without Mises.  For all of Hayek's brilliance and for all the ways I find his work to be endlessly fascinating and challenging, he is always standing on Mises's shoulders. 

Mises story is told at great length in my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. On the web, a short and useful biographical essay and timeline on him can be found at the site of the Mises Institute. His "says it all" work on economics, Human Action, has an interesting study guide. And free online copies of many of his works are here, courtesy of the Mises Institute.

Comments

|9.29.09 @ 6:58PM|#

Ludwig:

Slowly but inexorably, your theories are being vindicated to the chagrin of statists, Keynesians, Neo-classical economists and other charlatans.

Happy Birthday!

Joe M|9.29.09 @ 7:14PM|#

The only remaining question is how long can economic reality be denied.

Mark Brady|9.29.09 @ 7:15PM|#

Happy Birthday, Ludwig Mises!

|9.29.09 @ 7:43PM|#

In a just world, college students would be reading Mises with the same frequency and breadth as they now read Marx

More like, they'd read Mises in their economics classes, and Marx in an elective class on pathological personalities.

-jcr

JB|9.29.09 @ 8:06PM|#

Happy Birthday!

Fuck all statist fucks.

|9.29.09 @ 8:11PM|#

Happy Birthday Mises, the GREATEST INTELLECTUAL OF THE 20TH CENTURY.

road to surfdom, dude|9.29.09 @ 8:14PM|#

How is Hayek a major "american" libertarian giant?
I claim him for Britain.

John C. Randolph|9.29.09 @ 8:17PM|#

GREATEST INTELLECTUAL OF THE 20TH CENTURY

He's in the top ten, but there is a lot of competition. Einstein, Feynman, his own students Hayek and Rothbard...

-jcr

|9.29.09 @ 8:57PM|#

fountainhead of modern libertarianism

Oh, I see what you did there.

|9.29.09 @ 10:07PM|#

Even Max Weber went Austrian after corresponding with old Ludwig.

qwerty|9.29.09 @ 10:14PM|#

Mises was a great thinker and a great man, but I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that "everyone from Hayek to Rand to Rothbard learned their take on economics from him". Hayek and Rothbard, OK, but Rand and certainly Friedman did it without much help from him.

Mises was a great fountainhead of libertarianism, but not the only one.

Happy Birthday!

qwerty|9.29.09 @ 10:40PM|#

GREATEST INTELLECTUAL OF THE 20TH CENTURY

hmm, interesting game: Here's my top 10

Albert Einstein
Milton Friedman
Pablo Picasso
Charles Murray
Noam Chomsky
George Orwell
Steven Pinker
Thomas Sowell
William Buckley
Richard Feynman

MNG|9.29.09 @ 11:12PM|#

This may surprise some people, but I really like von Mises. I read his work Bureaucracy in college, it was really thought provoking.

Brian Doherty|9.29.09 @ 11:28PM|#

Qwerty---I didn't say Friedman, and you are wrong about Rand. Direct quote from her: "as far as my economics and political economy are concerned, Ludwig Von Mises is the most important thing that's ever happened to me."

qwerty|9.30.09 @ 12:51AM|#

Here's another Rand quote:

"The only philosophical debt I can acknowledge is to Aristotle."

No mention of Mises. She became a libertarian long before she met Mises. Heck, she wrote "We the Living" before she met him.

Brian Doherty|9.30.09 @ 2:03AM|#

Qwerty, read what I said. It was about economics. You can choose to believe Rand's later self-aggrandizing comments about her intellectual development; they are not true. To correct myself: that quote above was as recalled by Sylvester Petro, not direct from Rand's pen--my memory failed me. But whose books on economics were sold by the Rand-approved NBI book service in the 1960s? Who did Rand rely on and refer to as "the great economist Ludwig von Mises" while attempting to straighten out a correspondent in 1960? (see Letters of Ayn Rand, 582)? Mises, and two other Mises acolytes, Sennholz and Hazlitt. Yes, her understanding of free market economics was shaped by Mises.

Miguel Sedamano|9.30.09 @ 2:39AM|#

Today is the birthday of Ludwig Von Mises, one of the great thinkers of all times, an intellectual has no equal...During his life, Mises defended the cause of freedom and liberty with wit, imagination, intelligence, and wisdom. He explained the ideas of Economical freedom with luminous clarity and imaginative empathy...We need more people like Ludwig Von Mises nowadays!!

|9.30.09 @ 4:20AM|#

Mises shaped my thinking in college even though none of my professors mentioned him. I would read his words and as I was doing so felt I was understanding human beings and the World as they are. My son's 15th birthday was 9/29. I gave him my copy of Human Action with a tear in my eye.

@|9.30.09 @ 7:53AM|#

One of the best deals I ever made was when I joined the Conservative Book Club. No, not because of all the crappy, religious, right wing hack-work for sale, but because I got several free books, including the hardcover of Human Action, Third Revised Edition, with no strings attached. I cancelled the account and kept the books.

John C. Randolph|9.30.09 @ 8:01AM|#

She became a libertarian long before she met Mises.

She never became a libertarian.

-jcr

Steven Horwitz|9.30.09 @ 8:10AM|#

Brian's comments about Rand's debt to Mises are consistent with what I know as well. Certainly she had developed her political-economic views before meeting him, but his work strongly influenced her understanding of economics more specifically and the Objectivists put their stamp of approval on Mises.

Mises had some affection for Rand as well. The story, which might be more legend, is that Mises once called Rand "the most courageous man in America." When Rand heard that, she said "did he say MAN?" When that was confirmed, she reportedly burst out laughing with utter glee.

Make of that what you will...

Cabeza de Vaca|9.30.09 @ 8:13AM|#

I'm reading a biography about Ludwig right now called "The Last Knight of Liberalism". It's really good, I highly recommend it.

Guy Smiley|9.30.09 @ 8:44AM|#

Personally, I've never read a Mises book directly.

But reading (and especially listening to lectures from) Walter Block, Thomas Woods, Bob Murphy, and Tom DiLorenzo, at Mises.org,

as far as my economics, is the most important thing that's ever happened to me.