One of the great things about working at the Mises Institute is the opportunity to work and correspond with people from around the world. Whether we’re looking at Mises University students, Fellows, Senior Fellows, or Mises Wire writers, we can find writers and scholars from Poland, Britain, France, Brazil, Hong Kong, Spain, Mexico, and many other places as well.
From the very beginning, the Austrian school has always been an international movement. The movement’s roots can be found in Spain (with the Late Scholastics), in France (with Bastiat and the French liberals), and of course in Vienna with the early founders of what is identifiably the modern Austrian school.
And today, this internationalism continues. Apart from numerous scholars in North America, Mises Institute Senior Fellows and alums can be found teaching in Spain, Poland, France, England, Italy, and Brazil. Whether one is studying at a university under Guido Hülsmann in France or Per Bylund in Oklahoma, the insights of the Austrian school are equally illuminating.
This makes sense, after all, since we’re concerned with scholarship that isn’t just about one country or about one nation’s experience. Good economics applies everywhere.
Events at the Mises Institute can do a lot to bring scholars together and foster these international relationships. But it’s also important to provide a hub for information and scholarship that can be available year round, 24 hours per day.
And this is partly why we’ve put so much time and energy into making mises.org such an enormous and continually-updated source for new ideas, new scholarship, and new articles. Readers and writers from around the world can log onto mises.org daily, get new ideas from others, submit their own work, and be part of an international conversation.
In recent years, though, we’ve decided that it’s not enough to be just an English-language hub.
Some readers may have noticed that mises.org now features a Spanish-language section where, thanks to the hard work of volunteers, we’re continually adding more and more content in Spanish for a broader international audience.
While it’s true that English has largely become the international language of scholarship, we’re not content with reaching only professional scholars.
With more than half a billion Spanish speakers worldwide, we want to make sure that we’re reaching as broad an audience as we can.
And this has always been the mission of the Mises Institute overall. We’ve always been about advancing freedom and peace through good scholarship, sound economics, and honest history. We’ll always need trained scholars for that. But that’s never enough, and it’s why we are also careful to provide the insights and scholarship of the Austrian school to laypeople in a way they can easily read and understand.
Murray Rothbard, after all, wrote both complex economics books and articles for newspapers, magazines, and everyday readers. We never want to limit ourselves unnecessarily, and we’re glad to be able to bring these same ideas to the readers of the Spanish-speaking world as well.
Over time, we hope to continue these efforts to go beyond even these languages and these regions. The insights of good economics aren’t something meant for just one country or one part of the world. Everyone deserves to experience the benefits of freedom, free markets, and peace for himself.
