Mises was born on Sept 29, 1881, in the city of Lemberg (now Lvov) in Galicia.
Entering the University of Vienna at the turn of the century as leftist
interventionist, the young Mises discovered Principlesof Economics by
Carl Menger, the founding work of the Austrian School of economics, and was
quickly converted to the Austrian emphasis on individual action rather than
unrealistic mechanistic equations as the unit of economics analysis, and to the
importance of a free-market economy.
Having fled the Nazis to the United
States, Mises did some of his most important
work here. In over two decades of teaching, he inspired an emerging AustrianSchool
in the United States.
The year after Mises died in 1973, his most distinguished follower, F.A. Hayek,
was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in elaborating Mises’s
business cycle theory during the later 1920s and 1930s.
Mises wrote and lectured extensively on behalf of classical liberalism and
is seen as one of the leaders of the Austrian
School of economics. In
his treatise on economics, Human Action, Mises introduced praxeology as
the conceptual foundation of the science of human action, establishing economic
laws of apodictic certainty rejecting positivism and material causality. Many
of his works, including Human Action, were on two related economic themes:
- monetary economics and inflation;
- the differences between government
controlled economies and free trade.
Bibliography:
- The Theory of Money and
Credit (1912, 1953)
- Nation, State, and Economy
(1919)
- Socialism: An Economic and
Sociological Analysis(1922, 1932, 1951)
- Critique of
Interventionism
- Liberalism (1927,
1962)
- Epistemological Problems
of Economics
- Notes and Recollections
(1940)
- Omnipotent Government: The
Rise of Total
State and Total War
(1944)
- Bureaucracy (1944)
- Planning for Freedom
- Human Action: A Treatise
on Economics (1949, 1963, 1966, 1996)
- Theory and History: An
Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution
- The Anti-Capitalistic
Mentality
- The Ultimate Foundation of
Economic Science
- Economic Policy: Thoughts
for Today and Tomorrow
Ludwig von Mises