[This article is the preface to the new Iranian edition of Mises’s Epistemological Problems of Economics. The book is available in English on mises.org, and in the Mises Institute book store.]
It gives me great pleasure to know that this book will appear in the Farsi language, along with the introduction that I wrote twenty years ago for the third English edition. Ludwig von Mises deserves to be known and loved by students and scholars all over the world. He was born into a Jewish family and into a Christian country. But what he teaches is relevant for all human beings, irrespective of their religious faith and cultural background. Everyone knows that the laws of logic and mathematics are universal. They hold true at all times and all places. According to Mises, there are also social laws that have such universal validity, because they are rooted in the logical structure of the human mind. In the present book, he sets out to discuss the nature, problems, and methods of the science that deals with such universal laws of human action.
Mises was born in 1881 in the city of Lemberg (today Lviv, in Ukraine). When he was about ten years old, he moved with his family to Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There he received an excellent secondary education and then enrolled in 1900 as a student of law and government science at the University of Vienna. He obtained his doctorate in 1906 and went on, like his younger brother Richard, to prepare for a career as a university professor. In 1912, he obtained his Habilitation degree, but was never appointed to a regular full-time professorship. After WWI, he accepted an adjunct professorship at his Alma Mater and rose to fame as the chief economist of the Vienna chamber of commerce. In 1934, he accepted a visiting professorship in Geneva, Switzerland, at the Graduate Institute of International Studies. There he stayed for the next six years, working on a treatise on economics that would be published in 1940, in German, under the title Nationalökonomie, and then in an amended English version, in 1949, under the title Human Action. In 1940, Mises left Europe for New York City, where he became a US citizen and remained until the end of his life in 1973.
As a student at the University of Vienna, Mises was confronted with two opposing schools of economic thought: the German Historical School and the Austrian School. He started off attending the seminars of the historicist professors. They taught that there were no universal laws of economics. All causal relations in the sphere of human action were historically contingent. They are only true depending on the circumstances, and the circumstances are bound up in a constant flux of change. The causal sequences that determine economic life in Germany in the 1890s are therefore unlikely to be valid in France in the 1950s or in Iran in the 2020s. Mises eagerly absorbed the historicist hypotheses and methods. In fact, he became himself a very promising disciple of the historicist approach. But then he encountered the writings of Carl Menger (1840-1921), the fountainhead of the Austrian School. Menger taught that there were not only contingent facts and causal relations, but also exact and universal laws that determined the values and prices of all economic goods. In his eyes, economic science revolved around the study of such universals, whereas the study of contingent facts and relations was the proper job of historians, not of economists. Mises came to conclude that Menger and his disciples were right. He dedicated the rest of his life to developing the Austrian approach.
It was this decision that cost him his academic career. The tenets of the Austrian School have almost always been unpopular with the powers that be. Indeed, if there are universal laws of cause and effect, then governments and political parties are not omnipotent. They must conform the decisions to an objective reality which they do not control. This can be a bitter pill to swallow for an ambitious ruler, and it can be a veritable stumbling block in an election campaign, in which one party tries to outbid the others with ludicrous promises. Mises has always upheld truth to power and thereby provided great services to humanity. However, he was not useful to the powerful and therefore had to spent his life on the margins of state-funded academia.
He never complained. Early on, he had adopted his life’s motto from a verse of the Roman poet Virgil: “Do not give in to evil, but proceed ever more boldly against it.” With his scholarship and his personal virtue, he continues to serve all people of good will, right into the present time.
