FOLIO I · THINKER · GEN. 03 · N° 003

Ludwig von Mises

Works
73
Articles
268
Generation
3.
Portrait of Ludwig von MisesPortrait of Ludwig von Mises: Ludwig von Mises, Studio-Portrait des Mises Institute (1960)Portrait of Ludwig von Mises: Mises-Portrait (koloriert, hochskaliert) (2023)
FOL. 03 · N° 003 · Ludwig von Mises
BIOGRAPHY

Life and Work

Ludwig von Mises, whose great-great-grandfather had been raised to the hereditary nobility by Emperor Franz Joseph, came from a family of assimilated Jews and was born in 1881 in Galician Lemberg (today Lviv). Ludwig attended the Akademisches Gymnasium, studied law and, in 1909, after a brief period as a legal trainee, began his professional career at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. In the formal position of an ordinary official in the chamber's secretariat, where he was to remain for the next 35 years, he became in effect one of the country's leading economists. Under the influence of Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises turned to the ideas of the Austrian School at an early age, and as early as 1912 he obtained his habilitation with The Theory of Money and Credit. The far-reaching economic questions with which he subsequently concerned himself "were mostly problems with regard to which he held the prevailing opinion to be mistaken" (Hayek, in: Mises 1978, XII). Mises scarcely concealed that he had nothing but contempt for not a few representatives of his discipline. With Human Action (1949), the English reworking of his principal work Nationalökonomie (Economics, 1940), he gradually attained the success he had long sought. In these works, as in his earlier ones and those that followed, Mises consistently showed himself a perceptive observer and an incorruptible thinker. Some developments he anticipated long in advance as logically predictable consequences, such as the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s. Owing to his radically liberal stance, he rejected state intervention in the workings of the economy and all his life wrote resolutely against the presumptions of the statists. From anarchism, however, he clearly set himself apart. By his opponents, who were always in the majority, Mises was classified as stubborn, intolerant and extremist. His students emphasized the intellectual openness and broad-mindedness that prevailed in his private seminar. Yet he remained ever convinced of the truth of his theses and the value of his work, which throughout his life brought him neither wealth nor academic honours.
Metadata
Born
29. September 1881
in Lemberg
Died
10. Oktober 1973
in New York
Generation
Generation 3
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Life stations

Stations

  1. 1881
    1881
    Birth · Lemberg
    Birth

    Born on 29 September 1881 in Lemberg (today Lviv) in Galicia. He came from a family of assimilated Jews; his great-great-grandfather had been raised to the hereditary nobility by Emperor Franz Joseph.[3]

  2. ⁦1892–1900⁩
    ⁦1892–1900⁩
    School · Wien
    Akademisches Gymnasium

    Attended the Akademisches Gymnasium.

  3. ⁦1900–1906⁩
    ⁦1900–1906⁩
    Studies · Wien
    Studies in Law

    Studied law (at the University of Vienna).

  4. ⁦1902–1903⁩
    ⁦1902–1903⁩
    Military service · Wien
    One-year voluntary military service— approximate

    Military service as a one-year volunteer (Einjährig-Freiwilliger) in 1902/1903.[18]

  5. 1906
    1906
    Career · Wien
    Trainee lawyer (Konzipient)— inferred

    Worked for a short time as a trainee lawyer (Konzipient) before beginning his professional career at the Chamber of Commerce.

  6. 1906
    1906
    Doctorate · Wien
    Doctorate in Law (Dr. iuris)

    Doctorate (Dr. iuris) at the University of Vienna in February 1906.[2]

  7. ⁦1909–1934⁩
    ⁦1909–1934⁩
    Career · Wien
    Vienna Chamber of Commerce

    In 1909 he began his professional career at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce as an official of the chamber secretariat, where he effectively became one of the country's leading economists. This position ended in 1934, when he took up the chair at the IHEI in Geneva.

  8. 1912
    1912
    Publication · Wien
    “The Theory of Money and Credit”

    Publication of the habilitation thesis “The Theory of Money and Credit”.[3]

  9. 1913
    1913
    Habilitation · Wien
    Habilitation at the University of Vienna

    He completed his Habilitation in 1913 at the University of Vienna with "The Theory of Money and Credit", published in 1912. Under the influence of Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, he had turned to the thought of the Austrian School already in his youth.

  10. 1918
    1918
    Academic post · Wien
    Associate Professor, University of Vienna

    From 1918 as associate professor at the University of Vienna (an unsalaried lectureship, not a full professorship).[18]

  11. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Conference · Wien
    Mises Private Seminar

    In the 1920s he founded his renowned private seminar in his office at the Chamber of Commerce; a meeting place for Hayek, Machlup, Haberler, Morgenstern, Felix Kaufmann, Karl Menger and many others. It continued until his emigration in 1934.[3]

  12. 1922
    1922
    Publication · Wien
    “Die Gemeinwirtschaft” (Socialism)

    Publication of “Die Gemeinwirtschaft. Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus” (Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis; 1922) – Mises's systematic critique of socialism, with the argument of the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism.[3]

  13. 1927
    1927
    Founding · Wien
    Co-founding of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research

    In 1927, together with Friedrich August von Hayek, he founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research (today WIFO).[20]

  14. 1929
    1929
    Publication · Wien
    Prediction of the Great Depression— inferred

    Mises foresaw some developments far in advance as logically foreseeable consequences, such as the Great Depression at the end of the 1920s.

  15. ⁦1934–1940⁩
    ⁦1934–1940⁩
    Academic post · Genf
    Chair at the IHEI, Geneva

    He left Vienna in 1934 and took up a chair at the Institut universitaire de hautes études internationales (IHEI) in Geneva, where he taught until 1940.[21]

  16. 1938
    1938
    Marriage · Genf
    Marriage to Margit Sereny-Herzfeld

    In Geneva in 1938, he married the widow Margit Sereny-Herzfeld, a former actress. Margit von Mises would later publish her memoirs, "My Years with Ludwig von Mises" (1976).[21]

  17. 1940
    1940
    Publication · Genf
    "Nationalökonomie"

    Publication of his major German-language work, “Nationalökonomie. Theorie des Handelns und Wirtschaftens” (roughly “Economics: A Theory of Action and Economic Activity”), in Geneva in 1940 (published by Editions Union) – the precursor to “Human Action” (1949).

  18. 1940
    1940
    Emigration · New York
    Emigration to the United States

    Emigrated to the United States in 1940 with his wife Margit, by way of France, Spain and Portugal, and settled in New York.[3]

  19. ⁦1945–1969⁩
    ⁦1945–1969⁩
    Academic post · New York
    Visiting Professor at New York University

    From 1945 until his retirement in 1969, visiting professor at New York University (Graduate School of Business) – the position was financed not by the university but by private patrons (the William Volker Fund).[3]

  20. 1947
    1947
    Founding · Mont Pèlerin
    Co-founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society

    One of the founding members of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, at the invitation of Friedrich August von Hayek.[15]

  21. 1949
    1949
    Publication · New York
    “Human Action”

    With “Human Action” (1949), the English reworking of his principal work “Nationalökonomie” (1940; literally ‘Economics’), he gradually achieved the success he had long sought.[3]

  22. 1962
    1962
    Award · Wien
    Austrian Decoration for Science and Art

    In 1962 Mises received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.[22]

  23. 1973
    1973
    Death · New York
    Death

    Died in New York on 10 October 1973.

Relationships

Influences

Influenced by · 3
  1. ⁦1900–1906⁩
    ⁦1900–1906⁩
    Teacher

    Studied under Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and took part in his seminar at the University of Vienna; together with Menger one of the formative teachers for Mises' turn to the Austrian School.[3]

  2. ⁦1903–1906⁩
    ⁦1903–1906⁩
    Teacher

    Wieser wird in der Wikipedia-EN-Influences-Box von Mises gelistet; Mises hatte zu Wieser ein distanzierteres Verhältnis als zu Böhm-Bawerk.

  3. 1913
    1913
    Habilitation supervisor

    Philippovich war 1913 als Lehrstuhlinhaber für Politische Ökonomie der formelle Habilitationsbetreuer Mises' an der Universität Wien (Aufgabenhinweis aus Pipeline-Briefing).

Influenced · 11
  1. ⁦1918–1925⁩
    ⁦1918–1925⁩
    Teacher

    Studied at the University of Vienna under Ludwig von Mises, among others; later a regular participant in the Mises-Privatseminar.[3]

  2. ⁦1920–1920⁩
    ⁦1920–1920⁩
    Doctoral advisor

    Participant in the private seminar and member of the inner Mises circle in Vienna.[23]

  3. ⁦1921–1921⁩
    ⁦1921–1921⁩
    Doctoral advisor

    Received her doctorate in 1921 as one of the first women in the political sciences at the University of Vienna; the dissertation "Die Anweisungstheorie des Geldes" (The Assignment Theory of Money) was supervised by Ludwig von Mises.[25]

  4. ⁦1922–1931⁩
    ⁦1922–1931⁩
    Teacher

    Reading Ludwig von Mises' Socialism (Die Gemeinwirtschaft, 1922), which contained the proof of the impossibility of economic calculation in a socialist commonwealth, turned him away from his socialist sympathies. Quite soon Mises recognised Hayek's talent and invited him to his private seminar.[5]

  5. ⁦1923–1934⁩
    ⁦1923–1934⁩
    Doctoral advisor

    Machlup was a regular participant in Mises' private seminar and an intellectual student from the Viennese circle.[3]

  6. ⁦1949–1955⁩
    ⁦1949–1955⁩
    Doctoral advisor

    Translated numerous writings of Mises from German into English and thereby contributed substantially to the spread of Austrian monetary and business cycle theory in the English-speaking world.[6]

  7. ⁦1949–1959⁩
    ⁦1949–1959⁩
    Teacher

    Regarded as perhaps the most important Mises student in the New World; Rothbard deepened his teacher's approaches especially in the theory of money, monopoly, capital and interest.[7]

  8. ⁦1957–1957⁩
    ⁦1957–1957⁩
    Doctoral advisor

    Took his doctorate under Mises at NYU and became his successor there as the foremost representative of the Austrian tradition in the USA.[8]

  9. —
    —
    Academic influence
    Henry Hazlitt⁦(1894–1993)⁩ · US-Libertarismus

    Hazlitt was a journalistic follower of Mises in the USA, arranged the NYU position through the William Volker Fund and acted as a mediator between Mises and the wider American public.[3]

  10. —
    —
    Antipode
    Gustav von Schmoller⁦(1838–1917)⁩ · Jüngere Historische Schule

    Methodological antipode from the Methodenstreit; with The Theory of Money and Credit (Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel, 1912) Mises indirectly continued the dispute of the Austrian School against the Younger Historical School.

  11. —
    —
    Antipode
    John Maynard Keynes⁦(1883–1946)⁩ · Cambridge School

    Throughout his life Keynes was Mises' most important intellectual antipode in monetary and business cycle theory; Mises radically rejected state-interventionist approaches.[3]

Private seminar, colleagues, Mont Pèlerin · 28
  1. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar

    Schwiedland was a participant in the Mises-Privatseminar in Vienna.

  2. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar

    Regular participant in the Mises-Privatseminar in Vienna.[10]

  3. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar

    Kaufmann was a participant in the Mises-Privatseminar in Vienna.[3]

  4. ⁦1920–1938⁩
    ⁦1920–1938⁩
    Private seminar

    Participant in the private seminar of Ludwig von Mises in Vienna; a permanent member of the Nationalökonomische Gesellschaft until her expulsion in 1938.[24]

  5. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar

    Schlesinger war Teilnehmer am Mises-Privatseminar (Wikipedia EN).

  6. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar

    Illy war ständiger Teilnehmer am Mises-Privatseminar (bio_de bestätigt).

  7. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar
    Lionel Robbins⁦(1898–1984)⁩ · LSE

    Robbins was for a time a participant in the Privatseminar; later an important bridge of the Viennese circle to the LSE.[3]

  8. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar
    alfred-schutz

    Alfred Schütz (phenomenologist, a link to the Husserl school) was a regular participant in the Mises-Privatseminar.[3]

  9. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar
    erich-voegelin

    Eric Voegelin (political scientist and philosopher) was a participant in the Privatseminar.[3]

  10. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar
    Karl Menger jr.⁦(1902–1985)⁩ · Wiener Kreis (Mathematik)

    Karl Menger Jr. (mathematician, son of Carl Menger) was a participant in the Mises-Privatseminar.[3]

  11. ⁦1920–1930⁩
    ⁦1920–1930⁩
    Private seminar

    Mises' Privatseminar-Liste (mises.org Hayek Centenary) führt Rosenstein-Rodan unter den regelmäßigen Teilnehmern; aktiv bis zur Übersiedlung nach Großbritannien 1930.[11]

  12. ⁦1920–1934⁩
    ⁦1920–1934⁩
    Private seminar

    Participant in Ludwig von Mises' Privatseminar at the Vienna Handelskammer, together with Hayek, Haberler, Morgenstern and others.[27]

  13. ⁦1922–1934⁩
    ⁦1922–1934⁩
    Private seminar

    Long-standing participant in the Mises Privatseminar in Vienna; one of the few habilitated members of the Austrian School in the circle.[1]

  14. ⁦1922–1923⁩
    ⁦1922–1923⁩
    Colleague

    Fellow campaigner of Ludwig von Mises in the stabilization of the Austrian currency; together the two exerted influence on Federal Chancellor Ignaz Seipel, so that the policy of inflation and deficits came to an end.[16]

  15. 1927
    1927
    Co-author

    Together with Mises he founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research, where from 1927 Hayek did “hard pioneering work on the economic base”.

  16. ⁦1928–1938⁩
    ⁦1928–1938⁩
    Private seminar

    After his appointment at the Institute for Business Cycle Research, Schiff worked as a newspaper editor and regularly attended the Mises-Privatseminar in Vienna.[13]

  17. ⁦1928–1936⁩
    ⁦1928–1936⁩
    Private seminar

    Haberler regularly took part in the Mises-Privatseminar in Vienna.[3]

  18. ⁦1929–1938⁩
    ⁦1929–1938⁩
    Private seminar

    Participant in the Mises-Privatseminar in Vienna as a member of the inner circle of the Austrian School.[3]

  19. ⁦1930–1933⁩
    ⁦1930–1933⁩
    Private seminar

    Lachmann nahm laut Pipeline-Briefing als jüngeres Mitglied am Mises-Privatseminar teil; vor seiner Emigration nach London 1933.

  20. 1947
    1947
    Mont Pèlerin Society
    Frank Knight⁦(1885–1972)⁩ · Chicago School

    Both founding members of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947.

  21. ⁦1947–1931⁩
    ⁦1947–1931⁩
    Mont Pèlerin Society

    In 1947 at Vevey on Lake Geneva he gathered 39 non-collectivist thinkers from around the world, among them Ludwig von Mises, to found the Mont Pèlerin Society.[5]

  22. ⁦1947–1934⁩
    ⁦1947–1934⁩
    Mont Pèlerin Society

    He regularly took part in the Mises-Privatseminar, alongside his business activity in his parents' cardboard factory.[3]

  23. 1947
    1947
    Mont Pèlerin Society
    George Stigler⁦(1911–1991)⁩ · Chicago School

    Both founding members of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947; Stigler later MPS president.

  24. 1947
    1947
    Mont Pèlerin Society
    Milton Friedman⁦(1912–2006)⁩ · Chicago School

    Both founding members of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947.

  25. 1947
    1947
    Mont Pèlerin Society
    Wilhelm Röpke⁦(1899–1966)⁩ · Ordoliberalismus

    Both founding members of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947.

  26. ⁦1949–1959⁩
    ⁦1949–1959⁩
    Private seminar

    Teilnehmer am Mises-Privatseminar in New York 1949–1959 (NYU-Phase) – direkter Anschluss an die Wiener Privatseminar-Tradition über Mises.[17]

  27. ⁦1949–1959⁩
    ⁦1949–1959⁩
    Private seminar

    Participant in the Mises-Privatseminar at NYU from 1949 to the end of the 1950s, with activity into the 1970s.[7]

  28. —
    —
    Correspondent

    In 1957 Kauder described Mises as Menger's “most faithful student”; he was on friendly terms with him and commented on his ontological approach as the benchmark of Austrian theory.[14]

Ludwig von Mises in the context of the School as a whole: five generations, their teacher-student lineages, circles and collegial ties.

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SOURCES ON STATIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS55 citations · 6 sources
Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon· 1
Buch (Sekundärliteratur)· 3
Topography

Places of Activity

CATALOGUE OF WORKS · CHRONOLOGICAL

The Books

1900s
1902
21 yrs.
Book
The work, published in 1902 as a Viennese dissertation in political science, traces the development of the relationship between manorial lords and peasants in Galicia from the territory's passing to Austria at the first partition of Poland (1772) to the land emancipation (1848). Mises first reconstructs the rural order of Polish Galicia (subjection, seigneurial authority, rights of possession, labour services) and contrasts the inactivity of the Polish state with the interventionist Austrian one. At its core is an account of the Theresian and Josephinian reforms, the abolition of serfdom, the Robot Patents, and the failed tax and urbarial regulation of 1789, followed by the reaction in the post-Josephinian period. The peasant uprising of 1846 and the abolition of all robot obligations, which was finally decreed in 1848, are treated at length. The study draws throughout on archival records and contemporary legislation; in its concluding discussion Mises interprets the emancipation of the peasants not in natural-law terms but as the consequence of an economic order that had become incompatible with population growth.
OriginalGerman
1910s
1914
33 yrs.
Die Störungen im Wirtschaftsleben der österreichisch ungarischen Monarchie
Book
OriginalGerman
1919
38 yrs.
Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft
Book·2 editions
OriginalGerman
Further editions
  • Nation, State, and Economy
    OriginalEnglish
1920s
1923
42 yrs.
Book
In this essay, completed in 1923, Ludwig Mises examines the monetary-theory aspect of currency stabilization, taking as his starting point the hyperinflation in the German Reich and in Austria after the First World War. His central thesis: progressive currency depreciation is never an inevitable result of the economic situation, but always the consequence of inflationist policy, namely the covering of state expenditure through the issue of banknotes. Mises describes the possible collapse of a paper currency, demands as the first condition of reform the shutting down of the printing press and a return to gold, and argues against the balance-of-payments theory as well as against the notion that exchange controls could halt the decline. He addresses the argument of conditional inflationism, the reparations payments of the Treaty of Versailles, and sketches the outlines of a new monetary constitution tied to gold. In support, he draws on historical cases, the American continental currency (1781) and the French mandats territoriaux (1796). In conclusion, he interprets inflationism as an ideological problem, connected with statism and socialism.
OriginalGerman
1924
43 yrs.
Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (2., neubearbeitete Auflage)
Book·3 editions
OriginalGerman
Further editions
  • Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (1. Auflage)1912
    OriginalGerman
  • The Theory of Money and Credit1953
    OriginalEnglish
1927
46 yrs.
Liberalismus
Book·2 editions
OriginalGerman
Further editions
  • Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition
    OriginalEnglish
1928
47 yrs.
Geldwertstabilisierung und Konjunkturpolitik
Book
OriginalGerman
1929
48 yrs.
Book·2 editions
The volume gathers six essays on economic policy by Ludwig von Mises, published in 1929 under the title "Kritik des Interventionismus" (A Critique of Interventionism). Mises argues that there is no lasting third way between private and common ownership of the means of production: isolated state intervention in prices, wages, and production always fails to achieve the goal pursued by its originators and consequently drives either toward the abolition of the interventions or toward socialism. The texts engage critically with the German Historical School, the Kathedersozialismus or "socialism of the chair" (Schmoller, Brentano), the wage theory of the trade unions, Sombart, and Schmalenbach's thesis of the "bound economy" (gebundene Wirtschaft). The concluding pieces deal with the theory of price ceilings (Preistaxen) and the nationalization of the credit system.
OriginalGerman
Further editions
  • A Critique of Interventionism
    OriginalEnglish
1930s
1931
50 yrs.
Die Ursachen der Wirtschaftskrise
Book
OriginalGerman
Probleme der Wertlehre Die psychologischen Wurzeln des Widerstandes gegen die
Book
OriginalGerman
1932
51 yrs.
Die Gemeinwirtschaft (2., umgearbeitete Auflage)
Book·3 editions
OriginalGerman
Further editions
  • Die Gemeinwirtschaft (1. Auflage)1922
    OriginalGerman
  • Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis1951
    OriginalEnglish
1933
52 yrs.
Grundprobleme der Nationalökonomie
Book·2 editions
OriginalGerman
Further editions
  • Epistemological Problems of Economics
    OriginalEnglish
1940s
1944
63 yrs.
Book·2 editions
In "Bureaucracy" (1944), Ludwig von Mises examines the spread of bureaucratic administration as a symptom of the transition from a market economy to state control. His central thesis: bureaucracy is not bad in itself, but rather the necessary method wherever success cannot be calculated in monetary terms. Mises contrasts two organizational principles: the profit-oriented management of the entrepreneur, guided by economic calculation and the sovereignty of consumers, and the rule-bound bureaucratic management of public offices. From this contrast he concludes that private enterprises become bureaucratically rigid only through state intervention, and that socialist planning remains impossible to calculate for lack of market prices. Later chapters address the psychological and political consequences, such as the German youth movement, the selection of the dictator, and the decline of critical judgement. The examples are drawn mainly from Germany, France, Russia, and the United States of the New Deal era.
OriginalEnglish
Further editions
  • Die Bürokratie
    OriginalGerman
Book·2 editions
In this work, published in 1944, Ludwig von Mises analyses the rise and nature of German National Socialism and places it within a broader critique of Statism. His central thesis: Nazism is not a special path of German mentality, but the radical application of Interventionism and socialism to the situation of a densely populated nation that cannot do without imports and therefore seeks to conquer Lebensraum (living space). Mises traces the decline of German liberalism, the triumph of militarism and the transformation of Pan-Germanism into Nazism, and he treats Statism, nationalism, protectionism, autarky and anti-Semitism as interconnected phenomena. He argues that lasting peace is possible only in a free market economy, in which no economic causes of war exist, and he criticizes contemporary plans for world planning, federation and a league of nations as unworkable so long as nations adhere to Statism.
OriginalEnglish
Further editions
  • Im Namen des Staates: oder Die Gefahren des Kollektivismus1978
    OriginalGerman
1945
64 yrs.
Economic Planning
Book
OriginalEnglish
1947
66 yrs.
Book
In this essay, Ludwig von Mises examines the cooperative movement and disputes its claim to be a distinct, superior way of organizing economic life. He argues that the ambitious original program, the producers' cooperatives of Owen, King, and Lassalle that were to abolish the wage system, failed completely, leaving only consumers' cooperatives and farmers' purchasing and marketing cooperatives. Mises contends that the capitalist market economy is itself social cooperation under the division of labor and that profit-seeking private business, not the cooperatives, drives economic improvement. He maintains that cooperatives sell above cost, earn profit like any firm, and survive chiefly through tax exemptions, cheap credit, and other government privileges rather than through superior efficiency. The closing sections treat the political and monopolistic ambitions of the movement and conclude that cooperatives can be justified only without such privileges.
OriginalEnglish
Planned Chaos
Book
OriginalEnglish
1949
68 yrs.
Book·3 editions
Human Action is Ludwig von Mises' wide-ranging account of economics as part of a general science of human action that he calls praxeology. Its starting point is that human action is purposeful behaviour: the acting individual exchanges a less satisfactory state of affairs for a more satisfactory one. From this category of action Mises derives the theorems purely deductively, from value, preference and marginal utility through money, interest, capital and entrepreneurial profit to business cycle theory. The work is divided into seven parts and sets out catallactics, the theory of the market society, in contrast to socialism and interventionism, whose consequences it analyses. The central argument against the socialist planned economy is the impossibility of rational economic calculation without market prices. Methodologically, Mises sharply distinguishes aprioristic praxeology from historicism, positivism and polylogism.
OriginalEnglish
Further editions
  • Nationalökonomie: Theorie des Handelns und Wirtschaftens1940
    OriginalGerman
  • Menschliches Handeln: Eine Grundlegung ökonomischer Theorie2010
    OriginalGerman
    On Amazon ↗
1950s
1951
70 yrs.
Book
In this essay Ludwig von Mises defines profit and loss as the result of entrepreneurial foresight within the market process: profit arises where an entrepreneur assesses future prices more correctly than others and acquires factors of production below their later value, loss from the reverse misjudgement. Part A develops the economic nature of profit and loss, their social function as the consumers' instrument of direction, and their calculation. Part B refutes the condemnation of profit: the equality argument, the poverty thesis, the moral condemnation of profit-seeking, and the static mode of thought of the mathematical economists. Part C presents the alternative as an either/or between capitalism and socialism, holding that no third system without entrepreneurial profit and loss is possible. The text refers to Marx, Engels and Lenin as opposing positions and engages with the logician L. Susan Stebbing.
OriginalEnglish
1952
71 yrs.
Book
The collection of essays brings together seventeen speeches and articles by Ludwig von Mises from the years 1945 to 1965, arranged in four parts: the free market versus state planning, money and inflation, Mises as a critic of inflationism and socialism, as well as ideas. The guiding thesis is that there is no third order between a market economy and socialism: interventionism (price controls, minimum wages, credit expansion, progressive taxation) fails to achieve its intended goals and step by step leads into the planned economy of the German 'Zwangswirtschaft' (compulsory economy) pattern. Mises attributes rising real wages and prosperity solely to per-capita capital accumulation and criticizes Keynes, Say's Law and the misinterpretation of inflation as a mere rise in prices. The longest contribution, 'Profit and Loss', interprets entrepreneurial profit as the result of correct anticipation of future market conditions and as a steering mechanism that serves consumers.
OriginalEnglish
1956
75 yrs.
Book·2 editions
In this 1956 essay, Ludwig von Mises examines why capitalism, despite its material successes, is passionately rejected by many, especially by intellectuals. Mises traces this rejection psychologically to resentment: in a society of equality before the law, success is attributed to one's own merit, so that failure is experienced as a personal affront and projected onto a scapegoat, the market system. He develops the argument through particular groups (frustrated ambitions, intellectuals, white-collar workers, the idle heirs or "cousins", Broadway and Hollywood) and then examines the social philosophy of the common man, the position of literature under capitalism, and the non-economic objections (happiness, materialism, justice, liberty). Mises sharply distances himself from Marx, the socialists, and what he regards as a spurious anti-communism, and sets against this the order of the market economy as the sole foundation of prosperity and liberty.
OriginalEnglish
Further editions
  • Die Wurzeln des Anti-Kapitalismus
    OriginalGerman
1957
76 yrs.
Book·2 editions
Theory and History (1957) is Ludwig von Mises's principal methodological work. Its central thesis is methodological dualism: because human beings act purposively and are guided by ideas, the sciences of human action cannot be modeled on the experimental natural sciences. From this premise Mises distinguishes praxeology, the a priori theory of action whose best-developed branch is economics, from history and thymology, the understanding of individual valuations. The book proceeds in four parts: judgments of value, determinism and materialism (with an extended critique of Marxian dialectical materialism), the epistemological problems of history, and the philosophical interpretations of the historical course. Throughout, Mises argues against positivism, behaviorism, historicism, and scientism, and defends the autonomy of the sciences of human action against attempts to reduce them to the methods of physics.
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  • Theorie und Geschichte: Eine Interpretation sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Entwicklung
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1960s
1960
79 yrs.
Epistemological Problems of Economics
Book
OriginalEnglish
1962
81 yrs.
Book·2 editions
In this late work (1962), Ludwig von Mises sets out the epistemological foundations of the sciences of human action and argues against logical positivism. The central thesis: there is an unbridgeable dualism between the natural sciences, which study causality and regularity, and the sciences of action, whose fundamental category is finality, that is, action directed towards ends. Mises develops the category of action as the a priori basis of praxeology and history and distinguishes them from mathematics, geometry, and physics. He criticizes materialism, dialectical materialism of the Marxian stamp, behaviourism, the interpretation of statistics as law, as well as the macroeconomic and collectivist approach. The concluding chapters interpret positivism as the intellectual root of totalitarianism and of the crisis of Western civilization. Throughout, the argument proceeds deductively from the category of action; according to the preface, the work understands itself as a supplement to Mises's "Human Action" and "Theory and History".
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Further editions
  • Die Letztbegründung der Ökonomik: Ein methodologischer Essay
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1969
88 yrs.
Book
Ludwig von Mises traces the origins and intellectual environment of the Austrian School of Economics, beginning with Carl Menger's "Principles of Economics" (1871) and his early associates Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser. The essay describes the academic conditions at the Austrian universities, the liberal climate of the Habsburg constitution of 1867, and the special institutional role of the Privatdozenten. At its core lies the Methodenstreit: the conflict between the Austrian economists and the German Historical School around Gustav von Schmoller, which denied the possibility of universally valid economic theorems. Mises links this methodological dispute to Germany's political development, which he traces from Schmoller's social policy through Werner Sombart to National Socialism. Finally, he classifies the "Austrian School" as a nationally mislabelled chapter in the history of economic theory, one long since absorbed into general economics.
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1970s
1976
95 yrs.
My Years with Ludwig von Mises
Book
OriginalGerman
1978
97 yrs.
Book·3 editions
«Notes and Recollections» is the autobiographical work of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), written in 1940 during his emigration in Geneva and published posthumously from his papers in 1978. Mises describes his intellectual development from initial statism to his turn against the German historicism of the Schmoller school, his encounter with Carl Menger's «Principles of Economics», and his work within the Austrian School of Economics around Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser. At the centre stand the genesis of his monetary and business cycle theory, his doctrine of the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, and his critique of interventionism. He also reports on his practical work at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, on the struggle against Bolshevism and inflation in post-war Austria, on the Vienna Private Seminar, and on his later teaching in Geneva. The account is marked by deep cultural pessimism: as he himself writes, Mises sees himself not as a reformer but as a «historian of decline».
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Further editions
  • Notes and Recollections
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  • Memoirs2009
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On the Manipulation of Money and Credit
Book
OriginalEnglish
The Clash of Group Interests and Other Essays
Book
OriginalEnglish
1979
98 yrs.
Die Wurzeln des Antikapitalismus
Book
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Book·2 editions
In six lectures held in Buenos Aires in 1959, Ludwig von Mises explains the fundamentals of the market economy to a lay audience. The first lecture interprets capitalism as mass production for the needs of the masses and traces the rise in living standards to capital accumulation. There follow socialism as central planning without economic calculation, interventionism illustrated by failing price controls, inflation as a deliberate money-supply policy with unequal distributive effects, and the role of foreign investment in the development of poorer countries. The closing lecture connects the decline of constitutional government with the rule of interest groups and compares the situation to the Roman Empire as it disintegrated under interventionism and inflation.
OriginalEnglish
Further editions
1980s
1981
100 yrs.
The Theory of Money and Credit
Book
OriginalEnglish
1983
102 yrs.
Vom Wert der besseren Ideen 6 Vorlesungen über Wirtschaft und Politik
Book
OriginalGerman
1985
104 yrs.
Omnipotent government the rise of total state and total war
Book
OriginalEnglish
Theory and History An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution
Book
OriginalEnglish
1990s
1990
109 yrs.
Book
The anthology gathers 47 short essays, lectures, and reviews by Ludwig von Mises that appeared between 1942 and 1973 in periodicals such as The Freeman, National Review, and Christian Economics. In four parts it treats economic freedom (PART I), interventionism (PART II), Mises as a critic of the works of others (PART III), and the relationship between economics and ideas (PART IV). Recurring theses are consumer sovereignty in the market economy, the role of saving and capital formation in raising wages, the destructive effect of inflation and credit expansion, and the critique of Marx and Keynes. Mises argues that interventionism is not a third way between capitalism and socialism but leads inevitably to socialism. Each contribution is accompanied by its original source as a reference.
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Money, Method, and the Market Process
Book
OriginalEnglish
1991
110 yrs.
Two Essays Liberty and Poverty Middle of the Road Policy Leads to Socialism
Book
OriginalEnglish
1994
113 yrs.
The anticapitalistic mentality
Book
OriginalEnglish
1996
115 yrs.
The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays
Book
OriginalEnglish
1998
117 yrs.
Human Action a treatise on economics
Book
OriginalEnglish
2000s
2000
119 yrs.
Book
Ten lectures and memoranda that Mises wrote mostly during his first years after emigrating to the United States (1940 to 1944). Their common theme is international reconstruction after the Second World War. Mises traces the catastrophe of the war back to the economic nationalism of the interwar period and argues that lasting peace and prosperity are possible only through a return to free trade, private property, and a monetary system tied to gold. Among the topics addressed are the economic situation of post-war Europe, a non-inflationary proposal for a 100 per cent gold cover, a pan-European union, guidelines for the reconstruction of Austria, an Eastern European federation, and Mexico's development problems.
OriginalEnglish
2002
121 yrs.
Book
Forty-one articles, memoranda, and essays the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote between 1918 and 1938, most of them drawn from his papers seized by the Gestapo in Vienna and later recovered from a Moscow archive. The pieces address the monetary collapse and hyperinflation that followed the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the design of central banking and currency reform, the fiscal and interventionist policies of interwar Austria, and the deepening crisis of the Great Depression. Further essays defend the gold standard against managed-currency proposals, criticize autarky and economic nationalism, restate the method of the social sciences, and renew Mises's argument that rational economic calculation is impossible under socialist central planning. A Soviet polemic against Mises closes the volume as an appendix.
OriginalEnglish
2004
123 yrs.
The Free Market and Its Enemies: Pseudo-Science, Socialism, and Inflation
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  • Der Freie Markt und seine Feinde: Pseudowissenschaft, Sozialismus und Inflation
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2006
125 yrs.
Economic Freedom and Interventionism An Anthology of Articles and Essays
Book
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Marxism Unmasked: From Delusion to Destruction
Book
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Book
The volume collects five works by Ludwig von Mises on money, credit, and the business cycle, written between 1923 and 1946. At its centre stands the circulation credit theory of the business cycle: boom and crisis arise when banks artificially push the money rate of interest below the natural rate by expanding uncovered fiduciary media, which leads to malinvestments and an inevitable downturn. Mises applies this theory to the German inflation of the early 1920s, the stabilization debates surrounding Fisher and Keynes, and the Great Depression. He criticizes plans for a 'stable' value of money and for index standards, defends the gold standard, and attributes the duration of the crisis to interventions in wages, prices, and interest rates. The essays argue that only free market prices and the avoidance of credit expansion can moderate the cyclical fluctuations.
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2007
126 yrs.
Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics
Book
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2008
127 yrs.
Planning for Freedom Let the Market System Work
Book
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2010s
2010
129 yrs.
Book
A synthesis of eight to ten lectures that Ludwig von Mises delivered at FEE seminars in Irvington in the 1960s; Bettina Bien Greaves recorded them in shorthand, transcribed them, and in 2010 compiled them into a coherent text in twenty chapters. Mises develops money as a pure market phenomenon: it arises from indirect exchange and not from state decree, and the state's role is limited to safeguarding the content of contracts. He justifies the Gold Standard not on aesthetic grounds but on the grounds that the quantity of gold lies beyond the reach of manipulation by governments. He defines inflation as an increase in the money supply, not as the price rises that follow from it, and shows how it devalues the savings of the middle and working classes in particular. Historical cases range from the debasement of Roman coinage under Diocletian, through the German hyperinflation of 1923, to Bretton Woods and the Special Drawing Rights of the IMF. Greaves's editorial footnotes place persons, dates, and events in context.
OriginalEnglish
2012
131 yrs.
Book
Twenty-nine essays, lectures and memoranda by Mises on monetary, financial and trade policy from the years before, during and after the First World War. The contributions, organized into four parts, address the introduction of the Gold Standard in Austria-Hungary, the foreign-exchange policy of the Austro-Hungarian Bank, the financing of the war through taxes, bonds or inflation, the emigration question, the stabilization of the Austrian currency after 1918, and Mises's critique of Interventionism. Most of the pieces stem from Mises's "lost papers", which were found in 1996 in a Moscow archive, and appear here in English for the first time.
OriginalEnglish
2020s
2021
140 yrs.
Der freie Markt und seine Feinde: Pseudowissenschaft, Sozialismus und Inflation
Book
OriginalGerman
Die Letztbegründung der Ökonomik: Ein methodologischer Essay
Book
OriginalGerman
2022
141 yrs.
Menschliches Handeln: Eine Grundlegung ökonomischer Theorie
Book
OriginalGerman
ARTICLES · 268 CATALOGUED

Essays, Reviews, Lectures

1900s
1908
27 yrs.
Article
A collective review by Ludwig von Mises of the recent literature on money and banking, published around 1908 in a scholarly economics journal. Mises summarizes and evaluates 41 German-, English-, and French-language titles, arranged by subject area: first, two works on monetary theory (Hoffmann's doctrinal history of monetary-value theories, Kemmerer's reconstruction based on the quantity theory), then writings on the German money market and the Reichsbank, on the Austrian and Swiss banking question, as well as monographs on specific questions such as the monetary system of Luxembourg and the French colonial banks. He repeatedly examines the soundness of the monetary-value and currency theories, commends the wealth of material and the methodology, and distances himself from the gold-currency doctrine and from inflationist proposals. Knapp's State Theory of Money and the question of cash payments run through the review as points of reference.
OriginalGerman
1909
28 yrs.
Article
Ludwig von Mises examines whether Austria-Hungary should formally resume cash payments, that is, the legal obligation of the Austro-Hungarian Bank to redeem its notes in gold. His central thesis: in economic terms the gold standard had long been in place, for the Bank had, since 1896, always voluntarily supplied gold and gold-denominated foreign exchange and had kept exchange rates stable between the gold points. A statutory provision would only give legal recognition to this state of affairs and would change nothing in the Bank's policy. Mises refutes the prevailing view that the low Vienna discount rate rested on the suspension of cash payments, tracing it instead to the absence of short-term foreign debt and to weak domestic investment activity. He engages critically with Georg Friedrich Knapp's The State Theory of Money and finally addresses the banking dispute with Hungary. The study, divided into eight sections, appeared in Schmollers Jahrbuch and was completed at the end of 1908.
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The Foreign Exchange Policy of the Austro-Hungarian Bank
Article
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1910s
1910
29 yrs.
La Reforme financiere en Autriche
Article
OriginalFrench
Article
Ludwig von Mises responds to Walther Federn's rejoinder and defends his thesis that the Austro-Hungarian Bank makes foreign exchange available to the market at all times at a rate below the upper gold point, and thus in effect pays cash in foreign exchange. Federn claims that the bank at times refuses to supply foreign exchange to interest-rate arbitrageurs. Mises rejects this as contrary to the facts: the bank's only means of defence against gold outflows is to raise the discount rate. The argument proceeds empirically, drawing on the movements of the foreign-exchange rate for German banking centres since 1896, the annexation crisis of 1908/09 and the crisis of 1907, and is supported by statements from Governor von Bilinski and reports of the Vienna Stock Exchange Chamber. The text is connected with the contemporary debate about Knapp's State Theory of Money and the advantages of an isolated currency.
OriginalGerman
1912
31 yrs.
Article
Ludwig von Mises examines an Austrian government bill of 1911 intended to reorganize the duties levied on insurance, life-annuity, and provision contracts. He shows that the law on duties currently in force, deriving from the provisional law of 1850, has become opaque and, in terms of social policy, misguided, because it burdens the economically weaker more heavily in percentage terms. The draft replaces the multitude of previous stamp and individual duties with two percentage-based duties on premiums received and on the sums paid out in claims, which Mises acknowledges as an advance in the technical structure of the duties. At the same time he criticizes the sharp increase in the duty burden, the special treatment of policy loans, and the discretionary latitude of the Ministry of Finance in foreign business, and he compares the rates with the lower Prussian taxation of insurance. He situates the bill within the fiscal situation of the state budget and the party-political balance of power in the House of Deputies.
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Article
A short review by Ludwig von Mises of Paul Stiassny's monograph "Der österreichische Staatsbankerott von 1811" (The Austrian State Bankruptcy of 1811; Vienna and Leipzig 1912). Mises raises several criticisms: that the author devotes only 43 pages to the actual exposition, that a prefatory theorizing treatise on the problem of the "Zettelstaat" (the paper-money state) invites objection, and that the rest of the book consists of the verbatim reproduction of patents and documents. Such a work would perhaps have met with approval two decades ago, yet the now stricter scholarly standard of economic history no longer allows it to stand. Mises points to Beer's "Finanzen Österreichs im XIX. Jahrhundert" (Austria's Finances in the Nineteenth Century), which, despite all its shortcomings, offers better orientation on the catastrophe of 1811, and classifies Stiassny's text as a mere occasional piece marking the centenary of the bankruptcy.
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Article
A brief review by Ludwig von Mises of Otto Heyn's work "Erfordernisse des Geldes" (Requirements of Money), Leipzig 1912. Mises acknowledges Heyn's contributions to monetary theory, yet in the present sketch he sees the fundamental flaw in Heyn's method particularly clearly: Heyn systematically sidesteps the core problem of monetary theory, the determinants of the purchasing power of money. The review reports Heyn's thesis that in ordinary trade in goods no one takes the quantity of money into account, and that changes in the quantity of money directly affect only the rate of interest, the discount rate in particular, while the exchange value of money is affected only indirectly. Mises counters that such propositions contradict the prevailing doctrine and the facts of the quantity theory, and that they would have required a thorough justification, which Heyn fails to supply.
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Article
Ludwig von Mises reviews Andreas Walther's methodological study "Geldwert in der Geschichte" (The Value of Money in History, 1912), an attempt to provide a foundation for price-history work in the historical disciplines. Mises acknowledges the inquiry as astute and well-versed in the literature and emphasizes that Walther builds on the budget method refined by Wieser. The aim of price history, on this account, is to obtain a vivid conception of the social use-value of historical price data, not to convert them into present-day money. Mises is critical of Walther's attempt to establish scales of social stratification and "normal budgets": the concept of the normal is, he holds, inapplicable for the historian, and the concessions made to the prevailing view among historians go too far. Despite these objections, Mises emphatically recommends the work as reading for statisticians and historians.
OriginalGerman
1913
32 yrs.
Die allgemeine Teuerung im Lichte der theoretischen Nationalökonomie
Article
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1918
37 yrs.
Article
Ludwig von Mises sets out in this work, published in Vienna in 1918, how the costs of the First World War are borne by the economy and distributed among the citizens. His central thesis: a war can be waged only with present goods; it is not money that is decisive but the available real goods, and the burdens are always borne by the present generation, not the future one. Mises distinguishes three ways of financing the state (confiscation without compensation, taxation, and loans) and explains why financing through loans neither favours the capitalists nor shifts the burden onto later generations. Against the fear of a state bankruptcy he counters that Austria-Hungary raised its war debts domestically and that above all small savers would be affected, unlike in the Russian case he cites. As a serious danger he identifies the depreciation of money through an increase in the note issue, against which even mortgage bonds, mortgages, and real property would offer no reliable protection, and thereby makes the case for subscribing to the war loan.
OriginalGerman
1919
38 yrs.
Article
In 1919 Ludwig Mises examines how the monetary system of German-Austria is to be joined to that of the German Reich, should the political union come about. His central thesis: political union necessarily entails monetary union; an independent krone cannot be maintained alongside a common policy. Mises first traces the history of the Austrian currency (the Vienna Coinage Union of 1857, the currency reform of 1892, wartime inflation) and then develops two paths towards unification: the mere adoption of the mark currency by a separate German-Austrian bank of issue, or full incorporation into the German Reichsbank; the model of two cartel banks he rejects. Considerable space is devoted to the fiscal precondition (the Reich assumes part of the Austrian war debt) and to the setting of the conversion ratio between krone and mark, which, in his view, must be governed by purchasing power and not by the pre-war parity. Mises concludes that the monetary union is viable only if both states forgo any further inflation.
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Article
Ludwig Mises responds to an article by the financial councillor Dr Franz Bartsch and defends the thesis that the depreciation of the krone is caused by inflation, that is, the increase in banknotes, and not by an unfavourable balance of payments. According to Mises, Bartsch holds the balance-of-payments theory; Mises rejects any intermediate position between the two doctrines. Drawing on several examples from Bartsch's text (import risk, the compulsion to export imposed by the central foreign-exchange office, the import of cheese and watches), he argues that the foreign-exchange regulations fail to achieve their purpose and are shaped by the spirit of mercantilism. He also rejects the use of the printing press to provide for the population: inflation does not increase the stock of goods but acts like a tax that redistributes the income and wealth of domestic residents. Whoever wishes to restore the currency must combat the balance-of-payments doctrine and bring inflation to an end.
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Article
In this newspaper article, Ludwig Mises explains that an increase in the money supply causes the prices of all goods and services to rise, and that no measure of economic policy can halt this rise. The rise in domestic prices and the rise in the exchange rates of foreign currencies are, he argues, two sides of the same phenomenon: the exchange rate is determined by the purchasing power of domestic money, not by the balance of payments, because imports and exports depend primarily on prices. From this he concludes that neither anti-profiteering decrees nor a state foreign-exchange agency can slow the depreciation of the krone; some measures, such as the compulsory surrender of foreign exchange, even act like an export duty. The only remedy, he holds, is to put the state budget on a sound footing, so that the state can do without the printing press; otherwise the value of money faces complete collapse, as it did with the French assignats.
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Article
In 1918, Ludwig von Mises reviews Walter Huth's study on the development of the German and French great banks in connection with the respective national economy. Prompted by Adolf Weber's distinction between deposit banks and speculation banks, Huth places the German and French banking systems side by side for comparison and gives preference to mixed banking over banking based on the division of labour. Mises judges the work to be diligent and rich in material, but criticizes two shortcomings: its restriction to printed material and its apologetic character, which in his view turns the study into a defence of the German system. Above all, he misses the insight that the difference between the two types of bank is to be explained less by banking technique than by the structure of industry and commerce. He calls the concluding chapter on the consequences of the World War premature.
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Article
In this brief obituary, Ludwig Mises pays tribute to the Austrian industrialist and economist Richard Lieben. At its centre stands Lieben's principal scholarly work, the "Untersuchungen über die Theorie des Preises" (Investigations into the Theory of Price), written together with his brother-in-law Rudolf Auspitz and published thirty years earlier, which employs an analytical method and graphical representation and for that reason gained recognition only slowly. Mises does not count Auspitz and Lieben among the Austrian School, but places them, on account of their mathematical method, alongside Walras and Jevons. He also highlights Lieben's smaller writings on currency questions, his advocacy of a sound-money policy against inflationist doctrines, and his contributions to the Valutaenquete (currency enquiry) of 1892. The text closes by noting an eye ailment that denied Lieben his own work in his final years.
OriginalGerman
Article
In this article, published in 1919 in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Ludwig Mises analyses the imbalance in direct taxation between town and country in post-war Austria. His central thesis: because the fixed rates of yield tax have been eroded by the depreciation of money, rural landed property in fact contributes less and less, while the urban commercial population is squeezed dry through the taxation of apparent, inflation-induced war profits. Mises shows how, as the value of money falls, bookkeeping reports mere changes in monetary expression as profit, and he criticizes the raising of taxes in kind as a regression in fiscal technique. He calls for ground rent, as the only natural wealth of the land, to be drawn upon for taxation, and, in accordance with the principle of certainty, for forest taxation to be incamerated (taken into the state treasury). The text combines a tax-policy diagnosis with argument drawn from monetary theory.
OriginalGerman
Article
In this short article on economic policy, Ludwig Mises argues for the reintroduction of proper forward and spot dealing in foreign currencies and foreign exchange on an organised exchange, as well as for the abolition of the Foreign Exchange Office (Devisenzentrale) in Vienna. The starting point is the progressive depreciation of the krone: importers who obtain goods on credit from abroad and sell them at home for kronen bear an almost unbearable currency risk, and without a functioning forward market they have no means of hedging. Mises contends that the existing foreign-exchange restrictions achieve the opposite of their purpose and are retained only as part of the system of the wartime and transitional economy. He emphasizes the increased importance of Vienna as a trading centre between East and West, and closes by noting that all measures remain ineffective as long as inflation is sustained by the continual issue of new banknotes.
OriginalGerman
1920s
1920
39 yrs.
Article
Ludwig Mises responds to a Copenhagen report according to which the Soviet government had abolished money and replaced it with time-limited payment orders issued by the state goods-distribution offices. He reads the step as a further attempt, forced by the pressure of circumstances, to counter the galloping depreciation of the rouble, and draws parallels with the assignats of the French Revolution and with the Continental currency of the United States. At its core, he argues that in a purely socialist commonwealth, where the means of production as res extra commercium bear no money price, no economic calculation is possible: without economic calculation there can be no economic activity, and neither statistics nor calculation in kind nor calculation in labour hours can close this gap. The text refers to Stourm as a historian of revolutionary fiscal policy as well as to Lenin's demand for bourgeois accounting, and describes the question of calculation as the principal and fundamental problem of socialism.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig von Mises argues that a socialist economic order which abolishes private ownership of the means of production can no longer carry out rational economic calculation. Without a market for producer goods, no money prices form for these goods, and without such prices the costs and returns of competing methods of production cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Mises distinguishes monetary calculation from subjective use-value, calculation in kind, and the labour theory of value, and shows why none of these alternatives can replace the calculational function of money. In Section IV he links the problem of calculation to the absence of entrepreneurial responsibility and initiative in the nationalized enterprise. In the fifth section he examines the contemporary Marxist programmes of Otto Bauer and Lenin and reproaches them for failing to see the core problem of economic calculation at all. The text closes with the conclusion that rational economic activity in the socialist commonwealth is impossible, which, taken on its own, decides neither for nor against socialism.
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Article
Mises comments on the dramatic decline of the Central European currencies at the end of January 1920 and attributes the plunging exchange rates of the crown, the Reichsmark and the Czech crown solely to the continued inflationary policy of the states involved in the war. With reference to the North American Continental currency of 1781 and the French assignats of 1796, he warns that, if policy remained unchanged, the collapse of the currencies down to zero would become inevitable, with incomparably more severe consequences than on those earlier occasions, because Central Europe is industrialized. He explains the sharp decline of the Reichsmark by the inflationary doctrines of Knapp and Bendixen, as well as by Bendixen's proposal to redeem the German war bonds with a hundred billion new banknotes, while the Erzberger tax laws simultaneously paralysed German industry. He links the currency question to the danger of a Bolshevik overthrow and calls for a revision of the treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain. For German-Austria he concludes that only the immediate cessation of inflation could still avert state bankruptcy.
OriginalGerman
Article
On the occasion of Carl Menger's eightieth birthday, Ludwig von Mises pays tribute to his work and to his influence on economics. He traces how the science had reached an impasse around the middle of the nineteenth century, and how, around 1871, Menger in Austria, Jevons in England and Léon Walras in Switzerland, independently of one another, based the theory of value on the subjective use-value of goods. Menger's "Principles of Economics" is described as the book that revolutionized the discipline and on which all later work builds. The text refers to the "Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences" of 1883, to Menger's contributions to the currency problem, and to Wieser and Böhm-Bawerk as the other principal representatives of the Austrian School. In conclusion, Mises accords Menger's life's work an enduring place in the history of the social sciences.
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1921
40 yrs.
Article
In this essay, published in 1921 in the “Neue Freie Presse”, Ludwig Mises examines the legal claims of the holders of banknotes of the Austro-Hungarian Bank in the course of its liquidation under the Treaty of Saint-Germain. His central thesis: the war notes were in substance state notes, issued by the Bank in form only, which is why the note-holders have no claim beyond the conversion into the new legal tender at the respective exchange value. Any compensation beyond this would be an unexpected gift to precisely those who profited from the depreciation of the currency, and would not reach those harmed by the collapse in its value. Mises is particularly critical of point 9 of Article 206, which grants the presenting successor states an equal right to the Bank's entire assets, calling it an additional bonus that has no basis in monetary theory and that also violates the rights of the other creditors and the shareholders.
OriginalGerman
Die Arbeit im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen
Article
OriginalGerman
Article
In this short essay on economic policy, Ludwig Mises argues against the draft of a Viennese luxury-goods levy drawn up by the Vienna municipal authority. His central thesis: such a levy would fall above all on Vienna's luxury and final-goods industries, whose sales are made to a large extent through the retail trade to foreigners staying temporarily in Vienna. Unlike an ordinary consumption tax, the burden could not be shifted onto these foreign buyers, since they could simply redirect their orders to competitors abroad. Mises points to the German Turnover Tax Act of 24 December 1919, which exempts exports, and to the Czechoslovak luxury levy, which he interprets as a measure of economic warfare against Vienna as a trading city. Since a tax exemption for foreign buyers would in practice be unfeasible, the whole idea of the levy proves impracticable for Vienna and would endanger the business people, employees and workers of the luxury sector.
OriginalGerman
Article
In this short essay from the period of the Austrian inflation, Ludwig von Mises sets out a programme of economic policy for stabilizing the krone and the Viennese economy. His central thesis: the objective preconditions for Austria to flourish are in place, yet misguided policy is drawing down the reserves of earlier decades of a free economy. He traces the progressive depreciation of the krone to the inflation of banknotes, which in his view can be halted only by eliminating the state deficit, above all through the privatization of public enterprises and the winding-down of the food programme. In fifteen consecutively numbered points he calls for the stabilization of the value of money rather than a reduction in prices, the freeing of trade in foreign currency, the abolition of all import bans and impediments to transport, as well as free trade and tax concessions for new industrial facilities. Mises addresses the programme to a politician who had asked him for it, and concludes sceptically that hardly any party is prepared to carry it out, though he hopes that the reasonable course will prevail.
OriginalGerman
1922
41 yrs.
Article
In this commemorative essay, Ludwig Mises looks back on the Austrian Currency Inquiry Commission, which convened in Vienna in March 1892 under Finance Minister Steinbach and Sektionschef Böhm-Bawerk. He describes the problem of that time: it was not a progressive decline in the value of money but a rise in its value that drove the currency regulation, which gave Austria-Hungary a gold-core currency (Gold Exchange Standard) modelled on Ricardo's ideas. Mises sets the situation of 1892 against the present, in which the budget deficit must first be covered without recourse to the printing press before the currency problem can be solved. He recounts the debate between the light and the heavy gulden and Benedikt's plea for the current market rate (Momentkurs). As the central lesson, he records that it is not an unfavourable balance of payments but inflation alone that endangers the stability of the value of money.
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Article
Mises argues against the widespread demand to ease the situation perceived as a scarcity of money by issuing further banknotes. In his view, a scarcity of money, understood as a rise in the short-term interest rate, cannot be remedied by increasing the quantity of money: a larger quantity of money only raises prices and wages, but does not lower the interest rate. On the contrary, the expected depreciation of money drives interest rates upward, because creditors demand a purchasing-power premium. Mises interprets the shortage of banknotes in everyday transactions as a symptom of far-advanced inflation, in which panic buying anticipates a future depreciation. The only remedy he names is to stop the printing press; any further expansion of the note circulation would worsen the imbalance and threaten to bring about the collapse of the monetary system.
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Article
Ludwig von Mises reviews the third edition of William F. Spalding's 'Eastern Exchange, Currency and Finance' (London 1920) and recommends the work to the German readership. The occasion, according to Mises, is a widespread misunderstanding of the Gold Exchange Standard in the German monetary literature: he takes issue with Georg Friedrich Knapp and his pupils, who misinterpreted the Austro-Hungarian gold-core-currency policy and overlooked that it corresponds to the Gold Exchange Standard policy followed in British India, which follows on from Ricardo's 'Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency' (1816). Spalding's account of the monetary conditions of India, China, Japan and other Asian regions is, in Mises's view, especially valuable for the war and post-war period, which is difficult to access. Beyond monetary affairs, the book, as Mises notes, also covers the organization of trade and the customs system, and thus serves as a handbook for economists and the practical merchant alike.
OriginalGerman
Article
A brief book review by Ludwig Mises of Hugo C. M. Wendel's study "The Evolution of Industrial Freedom in Prussia, 1840-1849". Mises characterizes the work as a concise overview, based on printed material, of that period in the history of trade in Prussia which ended with the victory of guild ideas in the emergency decree of 9 February 1849. He differentiates the value of the study by reader group: to the German reader it offers little that is new, whereas to the American reader it provides an insight into the world, unfamiliar to him, of policy directed at the commercial middle class. He notes as a weakness that the intellectual-historical foundations of the medieval economic constitution are left out of account. The review closes with the place (Vienna) and an indication of authorship, and thereby treats freedom of trade, the guild system, and middle-class policy in the Prussia of the Vormärz (pre-March period).
OriginalGerman
1923
42 yrs.
Article
In this short newspaper article, Ludwig Mises discusses the book "Der Selbstmord eines Volkes, Wirtschaft in Österreich" (The Suicide of a People: Economy in Austria) by Siegfried Strakosch and takes it as the occasion for his own diagnosis of Austria's economic situation. His central thesis: the fundamental ill is the de facto dominance of socialist ideas and of Social Democracy, which prevents any consolidation of the state budget so long as state enterprises are not sold off and the eight-hour day is left untouched. Mises argues that socialist fiscal policy amounts to the consumption and destruction of productive capital, and he draws a historical parallel with the fiscal policy of the Jacobins, which, by way of an extended quotation from Stourm, he portrays as pure exploitation of the present at the expense of the future. The text closes with Strakosch's admonition to reverse course completely.
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Neue Beiträge zum Problem der sozialistischen Wirtschaftsrechnung
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OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig Mises reviews Waldemar Mitscherlich's 'Der Nationalismus Westeuropas' (The Nationalism of Western Europe) (Leipzig 1920). At the centre lies the distinction between nationality, the fact of national difference among people, and nationalism, the efficacy of certain ideologies that ascribe to this difference a significance for social behaviour. Mises argues that the neglect of this distinction has led to the criterion of the nation being sought somewhere other than in the linguistic community, and he refers to Arndt, Jakob Grimm and Wilhelm Scherer. He commends Mitscherlich's work as primarily a historically oriented attempt to explain the emergence of Western European nationalism genetically, but criticises the neglect of the economic problem, in particular of the connection between nationalism and protectionism, and the ideal of an autarkic union economy that follows from it.
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Article
In this short essay, Ludwig Mises pays tribute to the political work of Wilhelm Rosenberg, an economist and jurist whose significance Mises locates in his advocacy of an Austrian programme of self-help after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy. Mises describes the situation of a state deemed unviable after Saint-Germain, one that placed its hopes solely on the forbidden union with Germany and on foreign loans, while domestic reforms were left undone. Faced with the looming currency collapse in the autumn of 1921, Rosenberg, a student of Carl Menger and an opponent of inflationism, stepped forward as a private citizen alongside Finance Minister Gürtler. His programme called for cutting food subsidies, ending money printing, and eliminating the budget deficit before any loans could serve a purpose. Mises sets this success against the hostile reception among the contemporary 'opponents of stabilization' and closes with a personal obituary for Rosenberg as a leader of economic reconstruction.
OriginalGerman
1924
43 yrs.
Article
In this 1924 lecture, Ludwig Mises takes up the question of whether the gold standard should be retained as the foundation of the international monetary system or replaced by a state-directed paper-money system. After a reckoning with the inflationary and deflationary policies of the post-war years, he defends gold as a safeguard against government intervention in the determination of the value of money. At its centre lies a critique of the index-number standard: drawing on the practical and fundamental difficulties of computing a price index (the selection of goods, their weighting, the choice of the average), Mises shows that no index can measure the value of money unambiguously. He engages with the reform proposals of Keynes and Irving Fisher, and with the gold-exchange standard, in which reserves are held in gold-backed foreign exchange rather than in actual gold. His conclusion: the gold standard is not ideal, but under the prevailing circumstances it is the best possible one, because the alternative means perpetual struggles among interest groups over the value of money.
OriginalGerman
Article
In this obituary on the tenth anniversary of his death, Ludwig Mises honours Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk as scholar, teacher and statesman. He traces Böhm-Bawerk's scholarly career: from the early paper on capital interest in 1876, through the preparatory work of the 1880s, to “The Positive Theory of Capital” of 1889, the principal work on the theory of interest. Mises stresses the international recognition of Böhm-Bawerk's teaching and the long lack of understanding of the “Austrian School” within the German Reich. The occasion for the text is a collection of Böhm-Bawerk's shorter writings (1924), edited by Franz X. Weiß. Mises quotes at length Böhm's late statements on the passive balance of trade and on thrift in public budgets, which he reads as a clear-sighted diagnosis of Austrian state finances.
OriginalGerman
Article
The lecture defends the gold standard against proposals to replace it with a state-directed monetary system or one based on index numbers. Mises regards the inflationary and deflationary policies of the post-war years as refuted both in practice and in theory, and sees the decisive advantage of gold in the fact that the movement of its value remains independent of government intervention. The core of the argument is the critique of the index-number system: the selection and weighting of goods, the choice of the average, and the constant shifting of consumption make an exact measurement of the value of money impossible. He then discusses the gold bullion standard with foreign-exchange backing as well as the plans of Keynes and Irving Fisher, and rejects both. The conclusion: the choice lies only between the gold standard and a manipulated currency, and gold, though not an ideal solution, is under the given circumstances the best one possible, the reintroduction of which would require international agreements.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig Mises reviews the sixth edition of Karl Helfferich's standard work "Das Geld" (Money), first published in 1903. Mises honours Helfferich as the successor in monetary theory and currency policy to Ludwig Bamberger, who defended the German gold standard against bimetallists and inflationists. He locates the decisive break already between the first and second editions: Helfferich had fallen under the spell of Georg Friedrich Knapp's state theory of money and had sought, in an eclecticism that Mises found untenable, to reconcile Bamberger and Knapp. As a second shortcoming, he names the complete disregard of both the foreign and the German literature on monetary theory. Mises sees the book's enduring value in its discussions of monetary history and statistics, whereas in theoretical terms it does not satisfy.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig Mises reviews Gustav Seibt's occasional paper 'Deutschlands kranke Wirtschaft und ihre Wiederherstellung' ('Germany's Ailing Economy and Its Recovery') (Bonn 1923), which the Bonn professor of statistics had presented on 1 December 1922. Mises commends the paper for resolutely countering the common fallacies of contemporary economic policy: Seibt builds on arguments from monetary theory, develops the quantity theory and rejects the balance-of-payments theory of exchange rates, in order to ground on this his critique of the prevailing views on the sell-off, capital consumption, underproduction, tenant protection, tax policy and reparations. The reform programme culminates in the demands 'shutting down the printing press' and 'back to the free economy'. Mises notes that Seibt's warning of the collapse of the German monetary system has proved true, yet that he was heeded no more than other admonishers, and recommends the paper as a clear, generally intelligible introduction to the theoretical problems of German economic policy.
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1925
44 yrs.
Article
In this 1929 volume Ludwig von Mises brings together five studies on the economic policy and economic ideology of the present day, supplemented by the essay "Verstaatlichung des Kredits?" ("Nationalization of Credit?"). The central thesis: between an order founded on private ownership of the means of production and one founded on common ownership there is no permanently viable third form. Interventionism, which seeks only to regulate private ownership through governmental intervention rather than abolish it, is held to be internally contradictory: isolated interventions such as price controls or minimum wages fail to achieve their purpose and force the state step by step into full socialization. Mises argues from the standpoint of economics and critically engages with Kathedersozialismus (socialism of the chair), the Historical School (Schmoller, Brentano, Herkner), with J. M. Clark, and with Sombart's relationship to Marxism. The appended essay examines Deumer's proposal for a state credit monopoly and its bureaucratic consequences.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig Mises contributes a foreword to Fritz Machlup's monograph on the gold exchange standard (Goldkernwährung) and in doing so outlines the subject of the book. He traces how a gold currency without effective gold circulation took shape from the German coinage reform of 1871 to 1873, by way of the Indian currency reform of the 1890s, its intellectual origin lying in Ricardo's work of 1816. Mises describes the advantages of this arrangement (a reduced need for gold, interest-bearing foreign exchange reserves) and its critical point: not all countries can hold their reserves in gold-convertible foreign exchange at the same time. He places the question within the post-war debate, distances himself from the proposals of Irving Fisher and Keynes, and commends Machlup's presentation, both doctrinal-historical and systematic, together with the first German translation of Ricardo's currency plan in the appendix.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig Mises defends the gold standard in this essay from the series "Der Volkswirt" against contemporary proposals for a state-managed monetary order. His central argument: the advantage of gold lies not in a supposed value "in itself", but in the fact that increases and decreases in the quantity of gold are beyond political influence and are governed by the law of the profitability of mining. Against the plans for a currency based on index numbers, advocated by Keynes, Josiah Stamp and Irving Fisher, he raises two objections: changes in purchasing power cannot be measured unambiguously, and the effect of a change in the money supply on prices is neither proportional nor predictable. An index-linked currency would make the determination of the value of money an object of political struggle. Mises attributes the rise in prices over the preceding decades less to gold production than to the deliberate expansion of unbacked fiduciary media.
OriginalGerman
Article
The stenographic transcript brings together Ludwig von Mises's contributions to the discussion at the Stuttgart conference of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (1924) on the theoretical and economic-technical aspects of the currency problem. Against the sceptical view that theory remains without consequence, Mises counters that it was precisely the state theory of money and the rejection of the quantity theory that had made possible the inflationary policy of the war and post-war years. He interprets the stabilization as a transition to a gold-core or dollar-core currency, dismisses the fear of an inflation imported through the inflow of loans, and warns against undermining the effective redemption of banknotes through banking-technical contrivances or foreign-exchange regulations. In terms of the history of doctrine, he notes that opposition to the quantity theory is not of German origin but was imported into Germany together with the banking theory. In his replies he engages with Bortkiewicz, Spitzmüller and Bernhard, and describes his own influence on Austrian currency policy as confined to literary work and lectures.
OriginalGerman
Preistaxen
Article
OriginalGerman
1926
45 yrs.
Interventionismus
Article
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig Mises reviews the multi-volume collection 'Papers relating to Political Economy', in which F. Y. Edgeworth for the first time brings together his essays and critiques, which had appeared in scattered form in the Economic Journal over decades. Mises places Edgeworth among the leading English economists of the turn of the century and outlines the structure of the three volumes: value and distribution, monopoly and monetary theory, international trade, taxation, mathematical economics, and book reviews. At the centre is Edgeworth's reserved assessment of the mathematical method, which Mises expressly shares and supports with two quotations in the English original. He notes that a considerable part of the works brought something new at the time of publication, but is now outdated, and he values Edgeworth above all as a critical mind, more inclined to track down problems than to solve them.
OriginalGerman
Sozialliberalismus
Article
OriginalGerman
Article
The preface by Ludwig von Mises (Vienna, 5 January 1926) introduces Siegfried Strakosch's critique of the new agrarian programme of Austrian Social Democracy. Mises interprets this programme as an attempt to convert a large part of agriculture and forestry into an enterprise dependent on subsidies: the expropriation and nationalization of large landed estates and forests, even though, according to his account, the federal enterprises operate consistently at a deficit. He argues that the programme promises the rural electorate outlays from public funds without naming their financing, and that it aims solely at gaining votes. Strakosch, presented by Mises as a successful farmer as well as a natural scientist and a writer on economics, examines the programme in detail. Mises hopes that Strakosch's factual exposition will open readers' eyes to the danger of its implementation.
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1927
46 yrs.
Article
A rendering of a lecture given by Ludwig von Mises on 17 December 1926 before the Central Federation of Austrian Industry (Hauptverband der Industrie Österreichs). Mises argues that Europe ought not to expect the solution to its post-war problems from the United States, neither in political nor in economic-policy terms. He traces the transformation of the USA from a capital importer into the world's largest creditor after the World War, and documents it with figures from the American balance of payments and balance of trade for the years 1925 and 1926. He locates the inner contradiction in the high protective tariff: as a creditor country, the USA could recover the interest owed by its debtors only through imports of goods, while its tariff policy kept out precisely those imports. Mises concludes that the USA could supply capital, but not the political and ideological foundations of reconstruction, which would have to come from Europe itself.
OriginalGerman
Die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa
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OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig von Mises reviews John Maynard Keynes's essay "The End of Laissez-Faire", delivered as a Berlin lecture in 1926. Keynes criticizes liberalism and capitalism and repudiates free private ownership of the means of production, yet at the same time he rejects socialism and recommends, as a middle way, private property regulated by social control and exercised by semi-autonomous bodies within the framework of the state. Mises holds this proposal to be nothing new, but rather the long-standing programme of official scholarship. His principal objection is directed against the title: Keynes, he argues, speaks only of "laissez faire" but passes over "laissez passer" in silence, that is, the freedom of movement of people and goods. Precisely because the world has for decades no longer been governed according to this maxim, Mises sees war, mass misery and dictatorship as consequences of the prevailing anti-liberalism, not of liberalism.
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Article
Ludwig von Mises reviews "Neue Briefe über Grundrente, Rentenprinzip und soziale Frage an Schumacher" (New Letters to Schumacher on Ground Rent, the Rent Principle, and the Social Question) by Carl Rodbertus-Jagetzow, edited by Robert Michels and Ernst Ackermann (Karlsruhe 1926, Verlag G. Braun), the first volume of the "Bibliothek der Soziologie und Politik" (Library of Sociology and Politics). According to Mises, the letters, collected by Theophil Kozak, deal with agricultural credit, the rent principle, and the social question, as well as further political and economic topics; only Rodbertus's letters survive, not those of Schumacher. Mises highlights the appendix of around 150 pages, which contains partly unpublished documentary material, and especially Michels's introduction "Rodbertus und sein Kreis" (Rodbertus and His Circle), which in his view supersedes Dietzel's older work on Rodbertus. He regards the edition as an interesting contribution both to Rodbertus's teachings and to German history after the founding of the German Empire.
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Article
Ludwig von Mises reviews the first, English-German part of Hereward T. Price's "Volkswirtschaftliches Wörterbuch" (Dictionary of Economics; 1926). He welcomes the undertaking as a response to a long-felt need, but sharply criticizes its execution. He faults both gaps (such as Behaviourism, Institutionalism, Birmingham Currency School) and superfluous everyday terms, and above all imprecise or incorrect explanations of technical terms. Using examples such as hoard, acquisitive society, Banking Principle, residual claimant and invisible imports, Mises shows how the entries ought to have been framed more precisely, and points to the relevant literature and to his own translation in "Socialism" ("Die Gemeinwirtschaft"). Despite these objections, he considers the book a usable aid even in its present form, and expects improvements in future editions.
OriginalGerman
1928
47 yrs.
Bemerkungen zum Grundproblem der subjektivistischen Wertlehre
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OriginalGerman
Article
In this short programmatic text, Ludwig von Mises situates monetary theory within the development of theoretical economics. He divides its history into a classical, objectivist period (Hume, Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Say) and the subjectivist current active since about 1870 (Gossen, Menger, Walras, Jevons). His central thesis: the subjectivist school had for a long time not applied its theory of value to money, but had made up for this in the two decades before this text was composed, by going beyond the mere quantity theory and explaining the formation of the original value of money through the principle of marginal utility. To this he adds banking theory in the tradition of Wicksell, and business cycle theory. Mises emphasizes the continuity with the classical doctrine, refers to his "Theory of Money and Credit", and points to the significance of the insight that economic calculation is possible only as monetary calculation.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig von Mises reviews Eduard Heimann's work "Die sittliche Idee des Klassenkampfes und die Entartung des Kapitalismus" (The Moral Idea of the Class Struggle and the Degeneration of Capitalism; publisher J. H. W. Dietz Nachf., "Schriften zur Zeit" series, 1926). Mises distinguishes two parts of the book: in the first, Heimann justifies the class struggle as a moral value from a perspective coloured by Marxism and religion, which Mises criticizes as a line of argument that is utilitarian and difficult to reconcile with the Gospel. The second part, which rejects capitalism on account of inflation, tariffs and cartels, Mises takes seriously as economically relevant. He disputes Heimann's attribution of blame to the entrepreneurs and instead interprets the ills complained of as necessary consequences of an interventionist policy supported by all social strata. The review thus situates Heimann's diagnosis within the tradition of academic socialism (Kathedersozialismus) and protectionism, which Mises rejects.
OriginalGerman
Article
In 1928 Ludwig von Mises describes the state of the currency and public finances of the Republic of Austria. His starting point is the financial reconstruction initiated in 1922 by Federal Chancellor Seipel: the renunciation of the printing press, the balancing of the state budget and the fixing of the gold value of the krone, set against the inflationary policy of the post-war years under Renner. Mises portrays the successful stabilization, the introduction of the schilling and the groschen in 1924, and the note-issuing policy of the Austrian National Bank, which was bound to the Banking Act. Drawing on the federal budget estimate for 1928, he analyses tax revenues, monopolies and the loss-making public enterprises, above all the Federal Railways, the Post and the Forests. He sees the greatest need for reform in the costly administrations of the provinces and municipalities and in the municipal-socialist policy of Vienna. His conclusion: the stabilization has succeeded; the future task is one of production policy, above all the reduction of direct taxes.
OriginalGerman
1929
48 yrs.
Article
In this newspaper article of 1929, written for the unveiling of the Menger monument at the University of Vienna, Ludwig Mises gives a brief overview of the work of the Austrian School of Economics founded by Carl Menger. Mises traces the path from the classical economists (Hume, Smith, Ricardo), through the Methodenstreit against the German Historical School, to Menger's solution of the antinomy of value by means of the theory of marginal utility. He explains the subjective theory of value and the imputation of the prices of higher-order goods to consumer valuation, and names allies and successors: Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Jevons, Walras, Gossen, Clark. The closing section interprets the experiences of crisis and inflation in the war and post-war years as a confirmation of the theory that the Historical School had disdained, and sees Menger's work as having become the foundation of modern economics.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig von Mises reviews the first volume of Ernst Grünfeld's "Handbuch des Genossenschaftswesens" (Handbook of the Cooperative System, 1928), which is devoted to economic and sociological questions. Mises notes that the once ambitious economic-policy expectations placed on consumer, producer, and agricultural cooperatives, namely that they would overcome capitalism, have not been fulfilled, whereas the cooperative as a form of enterprise has acquired a lasting field of activity. At the centre of his review stands the sociological section (pages 42 to 49): Mises objects that Grünfeld omits the role of cooperatives in the service of political, religious, cultural, and national ideas, although it is precisely this extra-economic function that makes the cooperative system a unified phenomenon. Overall, he commends the work as an excellent achievement.
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Soziologie und Geschichte
Article
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Verstaatlichung des Kredits?
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OriginalGerman
1930s
1930
49 yrs.
Begreifen und Verstehen
Article
OriginalGerman
Article
Mises presents interventionism as a third economic system between capitalism and socialism and argues that it cannot exist as an independent, lasting system. Its means is the isolated intervention by the authorities, a single command that forces the use of the means of production against market conditions, without directing the whole of production along socialist lines. Using the example of the statutory maximum price, Mises demonstrates how such an intervention misses its own aim: a price below the market price causes the goods to disappear from the market and forces the authorities into ever further interventions, from compulsory selling, through rationing, to the fixing of all prices and wages. From this follows, for him, the alternative of either capitalism or socialism; a middle ground, he maintains, does not exist. The conclusion sets out why liberalism rejects these interventions not out of hostility to the state, but out of recognition of their self-defeating character.
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The Suitability of Methods of Ascertaining Changes in Purchasing Power for the Guidance of International Currency and Banking Policy
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OriginalEnglish
1931
50 yrs.
Das festangelegte Kapital
Article
OriginalGerman
Article
In 1931, Ludwig von Mises analyses the banking-policy lessons of the banking crisis of that time and identifies the close entanglement of German and Austrian banks with industry as the central weakness. Unlike English and American banks, which, as pure bankers, lent out money belonging to others, the German banks had become industrial conglomerates, so that the critical scrutiny of creditworthiness, which had served as a regulator of the money market, was lost. As the most urgent reform, Mises calls for the dissolution of the link between banks and conglomerates, a sharper differentiation of interest rates by maturity, the long-term investment of savings deposits to reduce the danger of a bank run, and greater transparency in the banks' financial statements. The banks' secretiveness had proved especially harmful; public oversight was indispensable to the safety of a banking institution. The text reads as an economic-policy commentary on the acute crisis of three major banks that had failed in Vienna and Berlin.
OriginalGerman
Article
In this 1931 newspaper article, Ludwig Mises defends the gold standard against its opponents. His central thesis: the gold standard removes the purchasing power of the monetary unit from the reach of shifting views on monetary policy and secures stable currency and foreign-exchange rates. Mises works through the objections of the gold standard's opponents one by one: the charge of excessive price increases (Irving Fisher), the desire for inflation, the alleged rise in the rate of interest, and the argument of an unfavourable balance of payments. He traces each objection back to the attempt to lower the rate of interest artificially through credit expansion, which, by way of an illusory boom, inevitably ends in crisis and currency collapse. He interprets the concentration of gold in the United States and France as a consequence of this policy on the part of other countries. His conclusion: policy has only the choice between the gold standard and inflation; even the poorest country can and must hold to gold, because only this makes it possible to attract foreign capital.
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Article
Mises argues against the interpretation that the severe economic crisis proves the failure of capitalism. In his view, it was not the capitalist system that failed, but the anti-capitalist policy of interventionism, statism and socialism. He understands the market as the regulator of production: through the prices of goods, wages and interest, it brings supply and demand into balance. State interventions such as tariffs, cartels, wages forced up by trade unions and unemployment benefits suppress this function and produce permanent unemployment, unsaleability and capital consumption. The text reinterprets concepts such as unsaleability and unemployment as price phenomena. As evidence of the advance of this policy, Mises names Sidney Webb and the socialists of the chair (Kathedersozialisten). His conclusion: only more work and new capital formation, that is, a break with the anti-capitalist policy that has prevailed for decades, lead out of the crisis.
OriginalGerman
Die psychologischen Wurzeln des Widerstandes gegen die nationalökonomische Theorie
Article
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Die Ursachen der Wirtschaftskrise
Article
OriginalGerman
Vom Weg der subjektivistischen Wertlehre
Article
OriginalGerman
1932
51 yrs.
Article
In this short text, Ludwig Mises discusses the polemic against British protective tariffs that was written in 1931/32 under the editorial direction of Sir William Beveridge at the London School of Economics and appeared as a German edition under the title "Zölle, Lehrbuch des internationalen Handels". The occasion is Great Britain's departure from liberal economic policy and the transition to protectionism. Mises recounts how the authors examine and refute all the arguments of the protectionists, in doing so penetrating to the causes of the Great Depression. At the heart of the text is the thesis that every intervention in the market and price mechanism disrupts the economic order resting on private ownership of the means of production, because only changes in prices adjust supply and demand to one another. The rigidity of money wages and interest rates, Mises argues, prevented this adjustment and, by way of protectionism and inflation, ultimately ends in the call for a planned economy.
OriginalGerman
Der Streit um die Wertlehre
Article
OriginalGerman
Article
The essay argues against the thesis, widespread in the wake of the Great Depression, that capitalism has failed and that the transition to socialism is inevitable. Mises counters that it is not capitalism but Interventionism and state and municipal socialism that have failed: the crisis, he argues, is the foreseeable consequence of decades of anti-capitalist and anti-liberal policy. The argument proceeds in three sections, beginning with the discovery of the laws of the market by social science (Hume, Adam Smith), moving through the effects of state intervention, and arriving at the situation of the entrepreneur in the interventionist state, where "connections" to politics come to matter more than cost-effective production. Mises sets the liberal doctrine apart from Marxism and Interventionism and concludes that the malfunctioning of the market caused by interventions in prices, wages and interest necessarily leads to crisis.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig von Mises argues that money is not a special case outside the general theory of value and price, but rather fits completely within it. The starting point is the threefold division of economic goods proposed by Knies into the means of production, of consumption, and of exchange. The text opposes the view that the value of money is 'imaginary' or merely conventional, and traces the subjectivist theory of value back to John Law. In five sections, Mises treats the value-forming service of money, the relationship between the stock of money and the demand for money together with a critique of the concept of the velocity of circulation, the changes in the value of money and the quantity theory, the money substitute (money certificate versus fiduciary media), as well as monetary calculation and the pseudo-problem of 'value stability'. Throughout, he sets the individualistic view of the market against the aggregate equation of exchange that he criticizes.
OriginalGerman
Rezension: Die Letzten Jahrzehnte einer Grossmacht: Menschen, Völker und Probleme des Habsburger-Reichs von Rudolf Sieghart
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OriginalGerman
The Great German Inflation
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OriginalEnglish
1933
52 yrs.
Article
Ludwig von Mises examines whether theoretical insight into the causes of the change in the business cycle will in future lead to smaller fluctuations, and denies this with an argument drawn from economic policy, not from theory. His starting point is the circulation credit theory, which he describes as the prevailing one and according to which the credit expansion that triggers the upswing is always sustained by the desire for cheap money. Mises argues that a credit expansion merely announced as temporary must remain without effect, because entrepreneurs take on new business ventures only when low interest rates are expected to be permanent. He attributes the duration of the present crisis to rigid wages and price supports, and cautions against underestimating the lessons of the older Currency School. As an unsolved problem he identifies the effects of falling prices and the question whether progress and capital formation are possible only by an inflationary route.
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Planwirtschaft und Sozialismus
Article
OriginalGerman
Senior’s Lectures on Monetary Problems
Article
OriginalEnglish
1934
53 yrs.
Article
This text is the preface that Ludwig von Mises wrote for the English edition of his work "The Theory of Money and Credit". Mises interprets the currency and banking policy of the early 1930s as a continuation of the same fundamental problems that had already shaped Great Britain's return to the old gold parity of the pound and the American prosperity of the years 1926 to 1929. He argues that the economic crisis was not to be blamed on the gold currency but on the preceding credit expansion, as well as on the political attempt to stabilize wages and prices by reducing the gold content of the currency unit. Against the idea of an index-based manipulation of purchasing power, he objects that every method of calculation favours particular interests and that the shaping of the value of money thereby becomes a plaything of politics. According to Mises, foreign-exchange controls and unilaterally imposed payment prohibitions had brought international credit transactions almost to a standstill.
OriginalGerman
Article
Mises sketches the emergence and reach of the Austrian School of Economics and sets it within the context of the economic-policy relations between Austria and Hungary. The starting point is the classical political economy of Hume, Smith and Ricardo, which could not solve the problem of price formation, because the paradox of value between useful and costly goods stood in its way. Carl Menger, he argues, overcame this antinomy with marginal utility: what is valued is not the class of goods, but the specific partial quantity, judged by the last want that is satisfied. From the subjective valuations of consumers, the theory of imputation derives the prices of the means of production, wages, interest and entrepreneurial profit. Mises traces the effect of the doctrine through Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser, as well as through Jevons, Walras and Clark. His reason is a practical one: the men who conducted Austria's and Hungary's economic-policy negotiations had, he notes, emerged from Menger's school, so that both countries build on the same theoretical foundations.
OriginalGerman
1935
54 yrs.
Der Kultus des lrrationalen [veröffentlicht in ungarischer Übersetzung: Ami értelemmel fel nem fogható]
Article
Der Weg der österreichischen Finanzpolitik
Article
OriginalGerman
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
Article
OriginalEnglish
Freizügigkeit als internationales Problem
Article
OriginalGerman
Neue Ausgabe der Werke Carl Mengers
Article
OriginalGerman
Review: The Gold Standard and its Future (3rd ed., 1934) von T.E. Gregory
Article
OriginalEnglish
1936
55 yrs.
Ein neuer Band der Gesammelten Werke Carl Mengers
Article
OriginalGerman
La Theorie dite Autrichienne du Cycle Economique
Article
OriginalFrench
Article
Ludwig von Mises reviews the concluding fourth volume of the collected edition of Carl Menger's writings, issued by the London School of Economics and edited by F. A. von Hayek; this volume brings together his works on monetary theory and currency policy. Among the items named are Menger's summary treatment of monetary theory of 1909 for the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (Concise Dictionary of Political Sciences), his essays on Austrian currency regulation, and his statements in the currency inquiry of 1892, supplemented by a bibliography of Menger's writings. Mises stresses that nothing in the volume of more than 300 pages is materially out of date, and cites as a current example the debate over the currency regulation of 1892, in which Menger was among the advocates of a stabilization of the gulden at its then prevailing value. The volume closes with a longer quotation from Menger's arguments against a devaluation, in which he rejects the "small gulden" as an exploitation of the common man and calls for a just gulden that favours neither creditor nor debtor.
OriginalGerman
Memorandum on Exchange Stabilization and the Problem of Internal Planning
Article
OriginalEnglish
Memorandum on New Technical Arguments for Postponing Stabilization
Article
OriginalEnglish
Article
In this essay, Ludwig von Mises argues that economic and political liberalism stem from a single root and can endure only together. He interprets the market economy based on private property as a democratic order: property, in his view, is the result of a plebiscite of consumers, renewed each day, in which every penny represents a ballot. To this, in the constitution of the state, corresponds political democracy. The paradox of the present, he holds, lies in the fact that the democracy created by liberalism has decided against economic freedom and, through interventionism, statism and socialism, is at once undermining political democracy and civil liberties, moving towards dictatorship. In the second part, Mises discusses William E. Rappard's book "L'individu et l'état dans l'évolution constitutionnelle de la Suisse" (The Individual and the State in the Constitutional Evolution of Switzerland), which traces this development through the example of Switzerland from 1848 and 1874 down to the present-day crisis of statism.
OriginalGerman
1937
56 yrs.
Autarkie – der Weg ins Elend: Internationale Arbeitsteilung ist Grundlage der europäischen Kultur
Article
OriginalGerman
Der Völkerbund und das Rohstoffproblem
Article
OriginalGerman
Introduction: The Twilight of American Capitalism: An Economic Interpretation of the New Deal, A. S. J. Baster
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Logical Character of the Science of Human Conduct
Article
OriginalEnglish
1938
57 yrs.
Économie Dirigée et Démocratie
Article
OriginalFrench
Les Équations de l’économie mathématique et le problème du calcul économique en régime socialiste
Article
OriginalFrench
Or et Inflation
Article
OriginalFrench
Remarks at Le Colloque [Conference] Walter Lippmann
Article
OriginalFrench
Rezension: Die Wehrwirtschaft des totalen Krieges, Stefan Th. Possony. Paneuropa: R.N. Coudenhove-Kalergi. 14:3
Article
OriginalGerman
The Disintegration of the International Division of Labour
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Non-Neutrality of Money
Article
OriginalEnglish
1939
58 yrs.
Les Hypothèses de travail dans la science économique
Article
OriginalFrench
1940s
1940
59 yrs.
L’Autarcie et la guerre
Article
OriginalFrench
My Contributions to Economic Theory
Article
OriginalEnglish
1941
60 yrs.
American Credits for Europe?
Article
OriginalEnglish
Grandfather Willeke [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Productive Capitalism vs. Distributive Socialism: America’s Advantages in Postwar Reconstruction
Article
OriginalEnglish
Review: The Structure of the Nazi Economy, Maxine Y. Sweezy
Article
OriginalEnglish
1942
61 yrs.
Comenius [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Economic Nationalism and Peaceful Economic Cooperation
Article
OriginalEnglish
Germany’s Transport Problem [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Hitler’s Achilles Heel [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Hitler’s Counterfeit Reich: Behind the Scenes of Nazi Economy
Article
OriginalEnglish
Ideas sobre la Política Económica de la Postguerra
Article
OriginalSpanish
Inflation and You
Article
OriginalEnglish
Reich Gets Big Shock: New Securities Ordinance Viewed as Blow at System
Article
OriginalEnglish
Social Science and Natural Science
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Nazis Under Blockade [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
1943
62 yrs.
A New World Currency? [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Another Risorgimento! [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Autarky and Its Consequences
Article
OriginalEnglish
British Post-War Problems [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Elastic Expectations and the Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle
Article
OriginalEnglish
Industrial Empires [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Inflation and Money Supply [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Review: The Tragedy of European Labor, Adolf Sturmthal
Article
OriginalEnglish
Review: Victory Is Not Enough! The Strategy for a Lasting Peace, Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer
Article
OriginalEnglish
Socialism versus European Democracy
Article
OriginalEnglish
Super-National Organization Held No Way to Peace: Radical Change in Political Mentalities and Social and Economic Ideologies Viewed as Necessary in Order to Eradicate Economic Nationalism
Article
OriginalEnglish
The German Supply Problem [unsigned editorial]
Article
OriginalEnglish
1944
63 yrs.
Big Business and the Common Man: High Living Standards in U.S. Came from Big Mass Production Enterprise
Article
OriginalEnglish
Review: Nassau W. Senior: The Prophet of Modern Capitalism, S. Leon Levy
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Economic Causes of War
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Treatment of ‚Irrationality‘ in the Social Sciences
Article
OriginalEnglish
1945
64 yrs.
European Experiences with Price Control
Article
OriginalEnglish
Planning for Freedom
Article
OriginalEnglish
Review: A Challenge to Peacemakers: Conflicting National Aspirations in Central and Eastern Europe, Joseph S. Roucek, editor
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Clash of Group Interests
Article
OriginalEnglish
1946
65 yrs.
Business Under German Inflation
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Trade Cycle and Credit Expansion
Article
OriginalEnglish
1947
66 yrs.
Economics as a Bridge for Interhuman Understanding
Article
OriginalEnglish
Le Capitalisme a-t-il fait faillite?
Article
OriginalFrench
We Must Control Credit
Article
OriginalEnglish
1948
67 yrs.
Should We Return to a Gold Standard
Article
OriginalEnglish
Stones into Bread, the Keynesian Miracle
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Objectives of Economic Education
Article
OriginalEnglish
1949
68 yrs.
Laissez Faire or Dictatorship
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Why of Human Action
Article
OriginalEnglish
1950s
1950
69 yrs.
A Reading List for the Alert Citizen
Article
OriginalEnglish
Benjamin M. Anderson Challenges the Philosophy of the Pseudo-Progressives
Article
OriginalEnglish
Economic Aspects of the Pension Problem
Article
OriginalEnglish
Lord Keynes and Say’s Law
Article
OriginalEnglish
Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Alleged Injustice of Capitalism
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Economics of War
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Idea of Liberty is Western
Article
OriginalEnglish
1951
70 yrs.
Inflation [misprinted Injection in some editions] Must End in a Slump
Article
OriginalEnglish
Inflation: An Unworkable Fiscal Policy!
Article
OriginalEnglish
Inflation: How Government Generates It and Then Endeavors to Shift Responsibility
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Political Chances of Genuine Liberalism
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Symptomatic Keynes
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Trade Cycle
Article
OriginalEnglish
Trends Can Change
Article
OriginalEnglish
True German History. Review: Bismarck and the German Empire, Erich Eyck
Article
OriginalEnglish
1952
71 yrs.
Capital Supply and American Prosperity
Article
OriginalEnglish
India’s Economic Problem
Article
OriginalEnglish
On the Confiscation of Rent and Man’s Power to Reason
Article
OriginalEnglish
Our Leftist Economic Teaching
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Individual in Society
Article
OriginalEnglish
1953
72 yrs.
Agony of the Welfare State
Article
OriginalEnglish
Bemerkungen über die mathematische Behandlung nationalökonomischer Probleme
Article
OriginalGerman
Economics Too Exciting
Article
OriginalEnglish
Free Port of the World
Article
OriginalEnglish
Freedom is Slavery
Article
OriginalEnglish
Gold versus Paper
Article
OriginalEnglish
Why Read Adam Smith Today?
Article
OriginalEnglish
1954
73 yrs.
Letter to Mr. Rene A. Wormser, General Counsel for the Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations
Article
OriginalEnglish
Myrdal’s Economics
Article
OriginalEnglish
Preface to The Theory of Collective Bargaining, W. H. Hutt
Article
OriginalEnglish
1955
74 yrs.
Article
The text is a letter by Ludwig von Mises from 1955 on the problem of cartels and monopolies. Mises agrees to the reprinting of his remarks from his 1927 book Liberalism, though for the complete treatment he refers to his work Human Action. His central thesis: without state intervention there would be no monopoly problem worth mentioning, because policy rhetorically combats cartels while at the same time creating the very preconditions for them through protective tariffs, foreign-exchange restrictions, and international agreements. As evidence he cites American antitrust practice against big business and an investigation against a grocery chain. He calls on sincere opponents of monopoly to begin by abolishing all coercive economic measures.
OriginalGermanTranslationsEnglish
+ 13 more
EnglishGermanOriginalCzechSpanishFrenchItalianUkrainianArabicChinese (Traditional)CroatianLithuanianSlovakTurkishIndonesianBulgarian
Explodes Unification Fallacy (Review: How Can Europe Survive?, Hans F. Sennholz)
Article
OriginalEnglish
Government vs. Liberty (Review: The Economic Munich, Philip Cortney)
Article
OriginalEnglish
Inequality of Wealth and Incomes
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Green-Eyed Monster (Review: The Secret of American Prosperity, William E. Rappard)
Article
OriginalEnglish
1956
75 yrs.
Facts about the Industrial Revolution
Article
OriginalEnglish
Falsche Propheten
Article
OriginalEnglish
Freedom and Govemment
Article
OriginalEnglish
Luxuries into Necessities
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Plight of Business Forecasting
Article
OriginalEnglish
1957
76 yrs.
Der Sparer als Wähler
Article
OriginalEnglish
Die Rolle der Vorstellung vom Volkseinkommen in der Weltpolitik
Article
OriginalGerman
Article
A programmatic essay by Ludwig von Mises on interventionism as an economic-policy programme between capitalism and socialism. Mises denies that interventionism represents a lasting third solution: in his account, state interventions in prices, wages, interest, and credit generate follow-on problems that compel further interventions, until complete socialism stands at the end. The argument proceeds from the market economy as Consumer Sovereignty, from the monetary Business Cycle Theory (credit expansion leads inevitably to crisis), and from the role of private property in the economic and cultural flourishing of the West. Mises draws on Engels's addendum to The Communist Manifesto, according to which interventionist measures necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and he distinguishes classical liberalism from the American usage of the word. The conclusion consists of a series of motto quotations on the state and the law.
OriginalGerman
Full Employment and Monetary Policy
Article
OriginalEnglish
Het Staatsingrijpen Interventionisme en zijn Gevolgen
Article
The Saver as a Voter
Article
OriginalEnglish
Vollbeschäftigung und Währungspolitik
Article
OriginalGerman
1958
77 yrs.
Economic Freedom in the Present Day World
Article
OriginalEnglish
Liberty and Property
Article
OriginalEnglish
Prólogo. Libertad y Abundancia, Gustavo R. Velasco
Article
OriginalSpanish
Wages, Unemployment and Inflation
Article
OriginalEnglish
1959
78 yrs.
Article
Mises reconstructs the intellectual origins of the German hyperinflation of 1923. His thesis: the catastrophe was not the result of unfortunate circumstances but rather the practical application of the doctrines of monetary policy that Lexis, Knapp, and Bendixen had formulated in the German Empire. At its core is an autobiographical retrospective on his disputes with representatives of the Historical School and the Verein für Sozialpolitik in the pre-war years. Mises recounts their objections to Böhm-Bawerk's theory of interest and to his own theory of money: the rejection of the Quantity Theory of Money, the distrust of gold-backed currency, the ideal of financial readiness for war. He describes how these positions dismissed every monetary explanation of the mark's depreciation as ridiculous. The frame of reference is provided by the opponents named in the text, Schmoller, Wagner, and Brentano, as well as Max Weber's struggle for value freedom in economics.
OriginalGerman
Capital and Interest: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and the Discriminating Reader
Article
OriginalEnglish
Article
Ludwig von Mises defines economic liberalism as the market economy founded on private property in the means of production, in which the purchasing consumers decide on the quantity and quality of goods. The text grounds liberalism in economics: the division of labour dissolves the biological struggle of all against all into societal competition and creates a harmony of the rightly understood interests. In six sections, Mises treats the relationship between liberalism and science, the rise and decline of the liberal movement since England and Scotland, the question of special interests, the primacy of consumption together with a critique of administrative price-fixing, free trade, and the failed attempts at a renewal. Against Socialism and Interventionism he argues that their interventions are counterproductive and lead step by step into full central planning. Genuine neo-liberalism he associates with economists such as Cannan, Einaudi, Hayek and Röpke.
OriginalGerman
Article
The encyclopaedia article "Markt" (Market) by Ludwig von Mises defines the market as the process by which, in an economy based on the division of labour, production is oriented towards the most urgent needs of consumers. The central thesis is the sovereignty of consumers: profit and loss steer control of the means of production into the hands of those who use them most effectively in the service of consumers. In six sections, Mises treats the market process, monopoly and competition, speculation as a fundamental feature of all economic activity, the unity of all sub-markets (the stock exchange, the labour market), profit and loss as a phenomenon of adjustment in relation to the stationary equilibrium, and the inequality of income and wealth as a result of consumer behaviour. He distinguishes his position from interventionist and socialist ones, and engages with Keynes's full-employment policy and with the demands of the "Communist Manifesto". The article concludes with a bibliography.
OriginalGermanTranslationsEnglish
+ 13 more
EnglishGermanOriginalCzechSpanishFrenchItalianUkrainianArabicChinese (Traditional)CroatianLithuanianSlovakTurkishIndonesianBulgarian
Six lectures presented in Argentina [Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow]
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Plight of the Underdeveloped Nations
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Soviet System’s Economic Failure
Article
OriginalEnglish
Undeveloped Countries
Article
OriginalEnglish
1960s
1960
79 yrs.
Foreword. The Economic Point of View, Israel Kirzner
Article
OriginalEnglish
Liberty and Its Antithesis
Article
OriginalEnglish
Socialism, Inflation and the Thrifty Householder
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Economic Foundations of Freedom
Article
OriginalEnglish
1961
80 yrs.
Epistemological Relativism in the Sciences of Human Action
Article
OriginalEnglish
Foreign Spokesmen for Freedom
Article
OriginalEnglish
Foreword. A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru, Louis Baudin
Article
OriginalEnglish
Article
In this essay, Ludwig von Mises argues against the doctrine of the innate equality of all human beings and sharply distinguishes it from the natural-law principle of equality before the law. People are born with different talents, he maintains; what is decisive is how a society deals with this inequality. In the market economy, as the central thesis holds, the more able can put their superiority to use only by serving consumers, whereas pre-capitalist and socialist orders subject the masses to the few. Mises sets himself against the contempt for the common man in the critique of advertising and consumption, against the levelling of the education system, and against the mysticism of majority rule. Drawing on Marx, Trotsky, and David Hume, he defends representative government not as an expression of natural equality but as a peaceful means of changing those in power. The move away from socialism he identifies as the task of the rising generation.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig von Mises argues that economic progress results solely from a more abundant supply of capital per capita, and he criticizes the more recent 'doctrine of growth'. This doctrine, he holds, borrows the concept of growth from biology and presents economic improvement as a mysterious process beyond human influence. Mises reads the doctrine of growth as a new phase in the campaign against saving and capital formation, in the tradition of Tugan-Baranovsky, Lederer, Foster and Catchings as well as Keynes, and as a means of disguising the failure of Soviet economic policy by means of questionable growth rates. He points to the increase in population, to the national products measured in money, and to the role of foreign capital investment in the spread of Western civilization. The essay closes with the thesis that only a progressive increase in the available capital goods can attain the aims of economic policy.
OriginalGerman
Niet hinken op twee gedachten
Article
On Equality and Inequality: The Low Estate of the Common Man in the Philosophy of the Left
Article
OriginalEnglish
Small and Big Business
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Elite Under Capitalism
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Marxian Class Conflict Doctrine
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Marxian Theory of Wage Rates
Article
OriginalEnglish
Unemployment and the Height of Wage Rates
Article
OriginalEnglish
1962
81 yrs.
A Dangerous Recommendation for High School Economics
Article
OriginalEnglish
A New Treatise on Economics (Review: Man, Economy and State, Murray N. Rothbard)
Article
OriginalEnglish
Freedom Has Made a Comeback: Breaking the Spell of Conformity
Article
OriginalEnglish
Tribute to F.A. von Hayek
Article
OriginalEnglish
Un episodio significativo
Article
OriginalItalian
Wage Earners and Employers
Article
OriginalEnglish
1963
82 yrs.
Article
Ludwig von Mises portrays the Austrian industrialist, farmer and agrarian-policy figure Siegfried von Strakosch (1867-1933), co-owner of the Hohenau sugar factory. The biographical essay links Strakosch's life, from his entry into the cloth industry through studies in the natural sciences in Vienna to his influence on economic policy, with an account of his thinking on agrarian policy. At its centre is Strakosch's position on the protective agricultural tariff: he read it not as a permanent institution but as a transitional and educational tariff, and saw in every further protective measure in favour of agriculture a step towards socialism. Mises discusses Strakosch's books, among them "Amerikanische Landwirtschaft" (American Agriculture), "Das Agrarproblem im Neuen Europa" (The Agrarian Problem in the New Europe) and "Der Selbstmord eines Volkes" (The Suicide of a People, 1922), and presents him as a representative of the Viennese haute bourgeoisie of the Franz Joseph era. A closing bibliographic note points to the private printing by his widow, Wally von Strakosch.
OriginalGerman
The Economic Role of Saving and Capital Goods
Article
OriginalEnglish
1964
83 yrs.
A National Policy for Peace
Article
OriginalEnglish
A New Primer on Economics [Review of Essentials of Economics: A Brief Survey of Principles and Policies, Faustino Ballvé]
Article
OriginalEnglish
Article
Ludwig von Mises argues that private ownership of the means of production in the market economy does not arise from force and appropriation, but from service to the consumer. He contrasts the seigneurial economic order, in which landholding lords depended on no market, with the market economy, in which consumers decide in a constant plebiscite who controls the means of production. Property thus appears as a social function that must be acquired anew each day. From this Mises derives the roots of modern liberties and civil rights: without a market economy, legal guarantees of freedom of the press or freedom of assembly would be worthless. In the final section he argues against the thesis that advertising renders the consumer defenceless, referring to Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders". The text announces a follow-up essay on monopolies.
OriginalGerman
Deception of Government Intervention
Article
OriginalEnglish
Professor Hutt on Keynesianism
Article
OriginalEnglish
Wage Interference by Government
Article
OriginalEnglish
Article
Ludwig von Mises argues that the future of the dollar is inseparably bound up with the future of the democratic-republican form of government. His thesis: the welfare state cannot be financed from taxation alone and therefore depends on continued inflation. Drawing on the American electoral system, Mises shows how candidates promise voters benefits without visible costs (something for nothing) and how the budget deficit becomes a permanent condition. He documents the monetary policy with quotations from Keynes, Beardsley Ruml and A. B. Lerner, and interprets inflation as a deliberate fraud that only a circulating gold-coin currency (a gold currency of the Bamberger type) would quickly expose through Gresham's law. The text takes a clear position against deficit financing and against the policy of compulsory economy, which presents itself as liberal and progressive, and concludes that democracy and parliamentarism cannot endure in the long run without a gold currency.
OriginalGerman
1965
84 yrs.
Article
Ludwig von Mises argues that in the free market economy the consumer is sovereign: competition compels every line of production towards the point at which it satisfies consumers' most urgent wants. The monopoly price is the sole exception to this rule, yet it arises only under a particular configuration of the demand curve, and only rarely. The central thesis of the essay is that it is not the free market but governments that make the formation of monopoly prices possible, through import duties, cartel protection, patent and copyright law, agricultural price support, and agreements such as the International Coffee Agreement. Mises contrasts this with the Marxist fable of immiseration, which, he says, has been superseded by the doctrine of the monopolistic displacement of competition, and he criticizes American anti-trust policy for sharing Moscow's diagnosis of monopoly. As a remedy he names the removal of every import restriction.
OriginalGerman
Article
Ludwig von Mises argues that the alleged unstoppable tendency of capitalism towards the formation of monopolies is a misinterpretation. On a free market undisturbed by state intervention, a monopoly price diverging from the competitive price arises only in rare exceptions (Mises names diamonds and mercury). In fact, his thesis runs, it is governments that create monopolies in the first place: through tariffs that make national cartels possible, through direct monopoly-price legislation, and through intergovernmental commodity agreements. As evidence he cites American farm legislation, the contradictory antitrust policy of the United States, and the international coffee agreement, whose quota system he interprets as a state-enforced world cartel. The essay closes by contrasting political majority democracy with the consumer sovereignty of the market.
OriginalGerman
The Gold Problem
Article
OriginalEnglish
1966
85 yrs.
Observations on the Russian Refom Movement
Article
OriginalEnglish
Some Observations on Current Economic Methods and Policies
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Outlook for Saving and Investment
Article
OriginalEnglish
The Supremacy of the Market
Article
OriginalEnglish
Wilhelm Röpke, RIP
Article
OriginalEnglish
1967
86 yrs.
EI Práctico
Article
OriginalSpanish
Hundred Years of Marxian Socialism
Article
OriginalEnglish
On Some Atavistic Economic Ideas
Article
OriginalEnglish
On the International Monetary Problem
Article
OriginalEnglish
1968
87 yrs.
The Market and the State
Article
OriginalEnglish
Wirtschaft und Staat
Article
OriginalGerman
1969
88 yrs.
Capitalism versus Socialism
Article
OriginalEnglish
On Current Monetary Problems
Article
OriginalEnglish
1970s
1973
92 yrs.
Foreword. Understanding the Dollar Crisis, Percy L. Greaves, Jr.
Article
OriginalEnglish
1979
98 yrs.
Capitalism
Article
OriginalEnglish
Interventionismus
Article
OriginalGerman
1980s
1980
99 yrs.
Foreign Investment
Article
OriginalEnglish
Inflation
Article
OriginalEnglish
Interventionism
Article
OriginalEnglish
Politics and Ideas
Article
OriginalEnglish
Article
Ludwig von Mises's 'Socialism' (the English version of 'Die Gemeinwirtschaft', 1922/1932) is a wide-ranging economic and sociological critique of socialism. Mises's central argument is the problem of economic calculation: without private ownership of the means of production there are no market prices for these means, and without such prices a socialist planned economy cannot rationally calculate production and the use of resources. The structure proceeds from the foundations (property, violence and contract, the social order) through the economics of an isolated and of an open socialist community to particular forms of socialism and pseudo-socialism. Further parts refute the Marxist claim of the historical inevitability of socialism, examine socialism as a moral postulate, and treat the 'destructionism' of interventionist policy. Mises explicitly sets his position apart from Marx, the Socialists of the Chair (Kathedersozialisten), and all varieties of statism. The epilogue added later interprets fascism, National Socialism, and Soviet communism as variants of the same anti-liberal character.
OriginalEnglish
1981
100 yrs.
The Wisdom of Ludwig von Mises
Article
OriginalEnglish
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