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The Meaning of Ludwig von Mises: Contributions in Economics, Sociology, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy

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A while ago I reviewed Israel Kirzner's excellent introduction to von Mises published by ISI ("Ludwig von Mises"). That work focused mostly on Mises's economic thought. If you would like to get an appreciation of the full scope of Mises's thinking, including political philosophy and sociology, this is a good place to start.

"The Meaning of Ludwig von Mises" contains eleven essays, hitting on all the key areas of Mises's thought. David Gordon's essay "Ludwig von Mises and the Philosophy of History" is excellent. If the basis of your sociological thought is methodological individualism, then any attempt to come up with "laws of history" as taught by the likes of Spengler and Toynbee is futile. Dr. Gordon then shows that Marxism is equally vulnerable. Nonetheless, I think Dr. Gordon's analysis is too sweeping. He concedes that Spengler and Toynbee made "insights." In fact, Dr. Gordon ends this essay by praising von Mises's suggestion that nationalism is largely explainable by economic interventionism. Hence there seem to be certain "patterns" in history, even if one doesn't wish to call them laws.

The essay I found most enjoyable was Leland Yeager's discussion of utilitarianism. Von Mises - in spite of his Kantian epistemology - was an advocate of utilitarianism. Rothbard broke with his mentor in this area, making sweeping statements about what a utilitarian can and cannot logically believe. Prof Yeager takes issue with Rothbard's understanding of utilitarianism and the theory of rights derivable from it. In particular, he makes some good arguments against Rothbard's view that blackmail should be legal. For example, according to Rothbard, Mr. A is free to tell Mr. B that he will spread lies about B's business unless B pays A money. Rothbard's conception of rights was excessively limited to property and contracts to transfer title to property. (For what it's worth, I put some comments about Rothbard's theory of rights in my review of "The Ethics of Liberty".)