Our friends at Grove City College have accomplished an incredible feat, digitizing their archive of Ludwig von Mises’s personal papers. In 1978, Hans Sennholz acquired this remarkable collection for the college from Margit von Mises and until this week, it was only accessible through a visit to Grove City.
Anyone who has read Guido Hulsmann’s Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism has already experienced a taste of what is available within these papers, as they were an essential part of his research for that project.
Navigating the archives offers viewers to explore 13 different categories of papers:
Series 1: General Correspondence
Series 2: College and University Correspondence
Series 3: Publishing Correspondence
Series 6: Personal Papers of Ludwig von Mises
Series 7: Personal Papers of Margit von Mises
Series 8: Correspondence Relating to the Death of Ludwig von Mises
Series 11: Collection Correspondence
Series 12: Oversized Materials
Some collections that may be of particular interest are his correspondence with Murray Rothbard (1, 2, 3), F.A. Hayek (1,2,3,4), and Henry Hazlitt (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Some particularly interesting finds I have discovered is a letter from Mises explaining why he is not a conservative, leading to him to turn down a speaking opportunity with the Yale Conservative Society. Another is a letter to William F. Buckley, criticizing an article he wrote for the National Review that attempted to write Robert Welch and the John Birch Society out of the “conservative movement.”
With the Mises archives consisting of over 20,000 articles, hours and hours could be spent exploring these unique personal items from one of the greatest intellectuals the world has produced. While a lot of the papers are small social notes with his broad circle of friends and contacts, there are still incredible insights into Mises the man and his views on the changing world around him during his years in America.
Thank you to Grove City College for making this available to all.
