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Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism

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Great lives make great biographies. If only this were always true. One problem is that many biographies, including very long books, are written about the mediocre, or even the boring (think of politicians). Another problem is that so often a hash is made of the effort to explain an interesting life. I am happy to report that Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism by Jörg Guido Hülsmann is a great biography of a great life. More precisely, this book tells the story of the great ideas, generated by a great mind, in the context of the life of a very good man, Ludwig von Mises.

To write about this book one must consider readers as two kinds of people; those who have read Human Action and those who have not. For those who have read Mises' magnum opus, Last Knight will hold a special place in their libraries, probably on the shelf next to Human Action. To have read Human Action implies that a person is aware of and understands Austrian economics. Furthermore, the normal response to this effort (it must be admitted that it is not an easy read) is a paradigm shift in thought, if not life. Certainly all aspects of economics and politics are then understood in a fresh light; such that events of the day that were once an incomprehensible blur come into sharp focus, and the myths and lies of the ruling class become as obvious as Pinocchio's nose, or more aptly, the emperor's new clothes. For these people Last Knight quenches the thirst for knowledge about the man, his personality, life, and times. It is also a wonderful history of ideas, depicting the paths to (Menger and Böhm-Bawerk) and from (Hayek and Rothbard) Human Action. I have already seen that this can be a controversial exercise among those who claim to be Austrian economists but well worth the effort. The milieu of teachers, colleagues, and students around Mises, especially in old Vienna (before WWI) and contemporary New York (50s and 60s) are fascinating. Mises really was a man of Vienna, and then late in life, of New York. Readers who already are part of the Austrian school will dream of attending the Mises seminars evoked by Hülsmann. Mises the person is an inspiration through his moral and physical courage, and his persistent and overriding quest for truth. But it must also be admitted that he was a bit of an odd fellow. Mises relationships as husband, son, bother, teacher, friend, colleague, and occasional adversary are interesting to those of us who care so much about his work.

For those who have not read Human Action, Last Knight makes a great primer for the ideas that comprise Austrian economics. All of the key ideas are discussed in a very approachable way that modern readers can readily grasp.

Of course for many a 1000 page primer might be as daunting as the original, but I can attest that it is very readable; I could not put it down. I should say, I had to put it down occasionally to rest my arms because it is a physically big book. However, the production values are excellent (I especially appreciated the attached cloth book mark) making it easy on the eyes, and at a very reasonable price, easy on the wallet. The history of writing and publishing the book is also of interest. The efforts of the publisher, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, are part of the continuing story of Mises' ideas. The saga of Mises' papers alone, Vienna, Berlin, to Moscow, tells much about the history of ideas in the 20th century.

Even the most positive book review must include some criticism. In this case my only quibble is that the book is too short. I still want to know more about Mises the man, his times, and his ideas. I hope to read more from Dr. Hülsmann in the future.

Reading this book was a pleasure. It is not just that this book is extremely readable, it is also a great work in the history of ideas and as a biography very fitting to the greatest mind of the social sciences, Ludwig von Mises. Maybe that's what makes reading it so exciting: that you come to realize just how much Mises contributed to economics and the social sciences, and with what courage and integrity he did it (in light of the hostile intellectual climate he faced in both Europe and the US).

In addition, I benefited from Hülsmann's discussion of the differences in marginal value theory between the competing schools and of his discussion of Mises's neglected masterpiece Theory and History. Throughout the book, such theoretically heavy topics are explained with remarkable lightness by professor Hülsmann.

I have always approached biographies of thinkers I admire with a certain enthusiasm based more on anticipation than on expected insight. In other words, I don't read biographies because I want to learn something new; I read them to confirm what I already know. The thrill for me comes in the form of anticipating in what direction the story is going to take. Will it be a biography of the social milieu in which that particular thinker matured, or will it be concerned more with the development of the thinker's intellectual thought? Ideally, a biography should cover both, and Hulsmann's book does just that, but (I would argue) with little success.

The book is an easy read, and enjoyable at times, but I feel that Hulsmann's quest for the discovery of the historical background of Mises' life overshadows the importance of his contribution to intellectual thought. Most of the book contains discussions of historical events like the two wars, the socialist experiment in Austria, inflation, etc. The mind of Mises is discussed only in connection to these events. It is difficult to fully appreciate the originality of Mises' arguments when the focus is clearly centered on concrete historical events. One has to hammer through hundreds of pages of historical content to reach the ideas Mises developed and presented throughout his career. And when I did finally reach that point, I often left with a feeling of disappointment. Hulsmann's treatment of Mises' work on Money, Socialism, and Human Action is for the most part unsatisfactory. I would say that the most enlightening and entertaining chapter would be "Nation, State, and Economy" ---- something that I certainly wasn't expecting.

Now the thoroughness of Hulsmann's research is evident on every page of this book. My dissatisfaction is a product of my own bias. It is my belief that biographies of intellectuals should be written as "intellectual biographies." Bruce Caldwell's Hayek's Challenge is a good example of this. With that said, I would still encourage people interested in Mises to read this book. But I don't think the book is as great as the other reviewers make it out to be. I would wager that Jeffrey Tucker and Mark Thornton prepared these written reviews even before reading the book! Their bias convinced them that this book is one for the ages, while my bias persuaded me to suspect that in 20 years this book will be forgotten.

This is an outstanding biography of a great economist and philosopher. Ludwig von Mises is the answer to everyone exasperated by the incomprehensible jargon and navel-gazing of modern day economics. His economics of individual action extends beyond economics to the foundation for liberty in society. This biography does a good job (in 1000+ pages) of placing the development of Mises' theories in the context of his times and of distinguishing sometimes subtle differences between similar arguments (such as Hayek on socialist calculation).

Beyond the specifics of Mises's theories, this is a great biography of a genius rejected in his own time, who persevered under crushing adversity and gave life to works that will endure for many lifetimes.

This biography is not a suitable introduction to Mises and his thoughts, although it presents a very good social history of Austria from before WWI to WWII. Better to start with Mises's own works: Liberalism, Theory Of Money & Credit, and Human Action. For anyone familiar with Mises, however, this book is a perfect gift and a must-have.

Liberty is a flickering concept in our world. It can survive as a concept and principle only if understood and defended by individuals. Ludwig von Mises was the greatest advocate for liberty, for he presents a value-neutral argument for the importance of maximum liberty in any society. When the majority of individuals knows who Mises is (if not understands him completely) and when this biography reaches a best-seller list, we can rest assured that individual liberty will be preserved.

This book was ten years in the making and the results are still beyond what anyone expected. Too many books on the Austrian School, particularly by Americans on what happened in European thought, continue to recycle the same old secondary sources, so you hardly ever read anything new.

But this book goes to the sources themselves, made possibly the author's broad language facility (French, German, English, Spanish, Latin), his background in the European tradition, and his access to libraries all over the Continent.

Thus does this book do more than tell about the life and work of Mises (and even though I thought I knew Mises, I didn't), it goes further to pretty well displace all other English-language books on the history of economics ideas as they pertain to the Austrian tradition.

What's more, it reads like a novel, so the otherwise scary fact of its size is not an issue. The prose is clean, the research completely fresh, and the subject matter as engaging as one might expect. Here we get a detailed account of the titanic struggles of the 20th century between socialism and capitalism, freedom and dictatorship, central planning and the free market, positivism and praxeology - it's all here.

In a time when economists are ever more specialized, this book comes as a reminder that there are big issues at stake, and that it requires courage and steadfastness to get in there and fight for what is right. Mises certainly did.

It is a phenomenal achievement for any scholar.

I am about 300 pages into the book and love it. I've been reading about Austrian economics for 25 years and yet I still learn something new in every chapter. The book is well written, inspiring, monumental!

This is a beatifully produced and exhaustively researched life of the greatest economist of the twentieth century. More than anyone, Ludwig von Mises was responsible for turning the tide against socialism and statism. At last there is biography worthy of the great man.

MISES is quite long, but I should mention that the text is fairly large and the footnotes take up a lot of space, so it shouldn't take as long to get through as it might seem.

One aspect of the book might be off-putting to many readers: Prof. Hulsmann assumes a fair amount of knowledge of economics. Some of what was discussed (the difference between Wieser, Schumpeter and Mises, for example) was a bit beyond my understanding, but the book moved at a fairly rapid rate nonetheless.

Even if Austrian economics isn't your interest, you will be fascinated by Mises' exciting life and the details you will learn about people with whom he interacted, such as Voegelin, Rand, Rothbard, Hayek and Hazlitt.

Having been so disappointed by the poor attempts at a biography of Hayek, I wondered how far this work would go towards capturing the man, the life and his works of Ludwig Von Mises. It has not disappointed; this is a magnificent volume!

It is a large volume, but you find the page turn quickly as the footnotes are, thankfully, at the bottom of each page.

The author has skillfully blended details of the life of Von Mises into his works, with an understandable commentary on his writings.

Get it; read it, and buy multiple copies to give away as presents.

Mises (1881-1973) is one of the sleeping giants of the 20th century. For many decades he was the leader of the "Austrian school" of economics and social thought but he is scarcely a household name, even among economists and classical liberals where he should be well known and appreciated. It is appropriate that he lived almost from the time that Carl Menger published the book that launched the Austrian school to the year before the conference at Royalton in the US that signaled the revival of the tradition.

The Austrians adopt an evolutionary or ecological approach to social and economic systems to emphasise the role of individual initiative and planning in a framework of traditions, organizations and institutions (especially markets). They were virtually buried in professional circles by the rise of Keynes and mathematical economics. The Austrians are skeptical of mathematics and they tend to be robust free traders and so they were dismissed for many years as unscientific and reactionary. A head count in the professional association in the US indicated that they are out-numbered by other schools by 50 to 1, despite robust growth since the revival of the 1970s.

The first quarter of the book is Young Ludwig and The Austrian School. This sketches the social, political and intellectual context for his life and work, including an endearing portrait of Carl Menger, the founder of the school. The second quarter is Officer, Gentleman, Scholar, covering the start of this career, his first major scholarly works on monetary theory, socialism and the politics of nationalism, and his involvement with Max Weber in the politics of the social science society. The third is Mises in his Prime including the years he spent in Geneva with the opportunity to address intellectual issues without the distraction of a bureaucratic day job. The fourth is Mises in America, from 1940 to 1973, a time when the school was practically invisible. This includes some little-known insights on the internal strains of the Mont Pelerin Society and some gossip from the Ayn Rand circle in New York which for a time included libertarians like Murray Rothbard and also von Mises.

When Mises was born the Austro-Hungarian empire encompassed Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, as well as parts of present-day Poland, Romania, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia and Montenegro. Writers, scholars, administrators, entrepreneurs and revolutionaries moved backwards and forwards between the major centres of the empire. They created a rich tradition of culture and learning that was multicultural in a way that is scarcely comprehensible to Anglo-Saxons. With at least ten languages in the empire, they fed on the thoughts of Russians, Poles and Germans with the same facility that they absorbed ideas from England and France, thought their accents betrayed them when they fled to safety in the west during the 1930s.

Some of the most important threads of modern thought passed through Vienna, not necessarily through the university but also through the coffee shops and private seminars. It is impossible to understand the intellectual life of Vienna between the wars without reference to the great private seminars. The best known were the circles of Schoenberg (progressive music) and the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. Others included a Freud group and seminars convened by Ludwig Mises, Karl Menger (son of the great economist) and Richard Mises (brother of Ludwig).

Mises was born of Jewish parents in Galica, now located in the Ukraine. His father was an engineer and his brother Richard was a physicist and mathematician. The family moved to the ancestral home in Vienna where he took a doctorate in law. In 1903 he read Carl Menger's classic book and he recorded that this experience "made an economist of me". In 1906 he took a doctorate in economics and from 1909 to 1934 he worked in the Austrian Chamber of Commerce , much of the time as the chief of the finance department, giving advice to the Government on monetary and financial policy. This was broken during the Great War when he served with the artillery in the Ukraine.

The first of his three major books was The Theory of Money and Credit (1912) which applied the concept of marginal utility to money and also set forth the first version of the Austrian theory of the trade cycle. In 1913 he was appointed as a Professor the university, not a paid post but one that entitled him to give lectures if he could attract an audience. Due to Menger's inactivity in old age and Boehm-Bawerk's early death it was left to Mises to consolidate the Austrian program, not by teaching undergraduate students but through his writing and his seminar where the leading lights included Hayek, Haberler, Machlup, Morgenstern in economics as well as Alfred Schutz and Felix Kaufman in sociology and philosophy.

He saw what was likely to happen when Hitler came to power and he moved from Vienna to Geneva in 1934. When Hitler swallowed Austria some Nazi agents raided his apartment and stole his library, if he had been living there he would have ended up in a death camp. He no longer felt safe in Switzerland and he moved on to the US in 1940. His library ended up in Moscow, neatly catologued and filed, after the Russians captured a trainload of German booty late in the war. In Geneva Mises completed the German version of the book that later appeared in English as Human Action (1949).

There are some nice human touches including is an exciting section on his escape to the US with his wife Margit, passing through France as the Germans moved in. He learned to drive in middle age and enjoyed it so much that he took to long distance touring with his wife. At least twice he almost drove off the road in the Alps and there were two moderately serious accidents.

The book is beautifully printed and bound.

Hulsmann's biography of Ludvig von Mises, father of Libertarianism,details the many socialist failures in Europe and their relationships to WW1 and WW2. Mises brought economics close to a science in his objectivity.

I will now tackle Mises' Human Action

Howard Long