Reading Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism has been a wonderful journey through the history of Austrian economics. Guido Hülsmann makes excellent introductions to economic issues that concerned Mises and the men of his time, making the topics a far easier read than one would imagine. Some of these issues are still thought provoking today, more
The book’s opening chapter, Roots, is a fairly detailed description of Ludwig von Mises’s familial background reaching back as far as 100 years before Ludwig was born. Mises was born into a Jewish family in the city of Lemberg, the capital of province Galicia in the then Habsburg Empire. Galicia had long been under Polish dominion, which, quite
The Vienna of old days! How was it like? What kind of people would one meet while walking on its streets? Was it a crowded, colorful, noisy and vibrant place comparable to modern metropolises, or was it rather a quiet, dignified, and, perhaps, even a boring old European city? It was, after all, a capital of a huge Empire hosting several dozens
With chapter 3, we are entering the beginnings of Mises’s life as scholar. There we have a very detailed account of how Mises’s outlook on matters of theory and policy were shaped, who influenced his early thinking and how it all relates to his later contributions to economics and social science in general. Mises’s formal university training was
Chapter 7 entitled The Great War is an extremely rich source of colorful material about Mises’s years during the World War I. The war years were quite busy for him. He was almost constantly on the road between dangerous assignments on the front and various capacities as a civil servant. During the time at the front, as in his life as scholar and
Chapter 8 bears the title of Mises’s second book, Nation, State, and Economy , and is devoted to a careful exposition and comprehensive theoretical analysis of the key factors that led to the disastrous World War I. Keeping the context of the general state of intellectual atmosphere of the time in mind, the book must certainly have caused some
We write the year 1919 . The lost war and the hardships that followed only intensified the process of political and economic disintegrations of the once mighty Austria-Hungarian Empire. Hopeless economic conditions contributed to greater, not less, tensions between nationalities, culminating in a total politico-territorial break-up, with entire
The problem of “psychologism†or psychological approach to economic theory and its significance in writings of earlier Austrian economists (Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser) as well as to theories of three eminent founders of the neoclassical school – Gossen, Jevons, and Walras (thereafter GJW), constitutes a major element in chapter 4 and is
Following Dr. Ransom’s most recent post, just a few lines in defense of Dr. Hülsmann’s choice of providing us with an extensive discussion of major and, to be sure, quite complicated problems of theory that seem to have divided even eminent economists of the Austrian school. Without any doubt, like Dr. Ransom, I, too, would have liked having a
In Chapter 5 we once again witness the sheer amount of time and research effort that went into gathering all the details spanning Mises’s first years following graduation. After a quite dense theoretical chapter four, the present chapter – though containing several important theoretical discussions, on which more below – is a relatively
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.