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Ludwig von Mises (September 29, 1881 - October 10,
1973), a notable economist and social philosopher,
was born Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises in
Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (today Lviv, Ukraine),
the son of Arthur von Mises, a railroad engineer
and civil servant, and Adele von Mises, born Adele
Landau.  He was the older brother of Richard von
Mises, who developed the Von Mises
stress|Distortion energy theory of Stress
(physics)|stress.  Von Mises was still a small boy
when his family moved to Vienna. In 1892 he
entered the Akademisches Gymnasium, where he
received a humanistic education and befriended
Hans Kelsen. Early on, von Mises was particularly
interested in history and politics. After
graduation, in 1900, he therefore began to study
at the department of law and government science at
the University of Vienna. 

== University education and influences ==

Studying under Carl Grünberg, von Mises started
off as an exponent of the so-called Historical
School of government science, which stressed
fact-finding and despised theoretical analysis.
But in the fall of 1903 he read Carl Menger's
Principles of Economics, the foundational text of
the Austrian School|Austrian School of economics.
The book turned him away from the historicist
approach, and in the following years he deepened
his studies of economic theory, especially in the
seminar of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, a former
finance minister and champion of the Austrian
School.



Von Mises graduated in February 1906 (Juris
Doctor). He started a career as a civil servant in
Austria's financial administration, but after a
few months quit in disgust with bureaucracy. For
the next two years, he worked as a trainee in a
Vienna law firm and also started lecturing on
economics. In early 1909, he joined the Vienna
Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where he worked
for the next twenty-five years. The chamber was at
the time a semi-governmental organization and
through its publications exercised a considerable
influence on Austrian politics.

Parallel to his pecuniary activities, von Mises
pursued ambitious scholarly interests and wrote a
treatise on money and banking. In his Theorie des
Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (1912), translated
into English language|English in 1934 as Theory of
Money and Credit, he made two lasting
contributions to economics: he demonstrated how
Menger's value theory applied to money, and he
presented a new business-cycle theory in the light
of which economic crises appeared as resulting
from inflation-induced misallocations of
resources. He also showed that money could not
possibly be neutral, and that increases of the
quantity of money always had redistribution
effects.

During World War I von Mises served as a front
officer in the Austro-Hungarian artillery and as
an economic adviser to the War Department. He
gained firsthand experience of the realities of
war socialism, which he would later digest in his
theory of socialism, and of the dynamics of
interventionism. In the last year of the war, he
received a prestigious but unpaid appointment as
professor extraordinarius at the University of
Vienna. 

After the war, von Mises briefly became an adjunct
member of the new republican government of
Germany|German Austria (the name carried by the
Austrian state until September 1919). He was the
authority on financial matters pertaining to
foreign affairs. But his main practical
achievement in this period was to persuade
socialist leader Otto Bauer, a former friend and
fellow student, not to attempt a Bolshevik coup.
He also published a book explaining the collapse
of multicultural Austria-Hungary. In Nation, Staat
und Wirtschaft (1919; translated as Nation, State,
and Economy, 1983), he argued that German
imperialism had resulted from applying the power
of the State to solve the problems of the
multicultural communities that prevailed in the
eastern provinces of Germany and Austria.  

In the fall of 1919, von Mises wrote his most
famous essay, on "economic calculation in the
socialist commonwealth." He argued that a
socialist leadership lacked the essential tool for
the rational allocation of
resources—Economic calculation
problem|economic calculation—and that only
the money prices of a capitalist economy make it
possible to compare alternative investment
projects in terms of a common unit. Two years
later he published a treatise on socialism (Die
Gemeinwirtschaft, 1922), which had a decisive
impact on a whole generation of rising
intellectual leaders—men such as future
nobel laureate F. A. Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke, who
after World War II would lead the nascent
neoliberal movement. 

During the early 1920s, von Mises successfully
fought inflation in Austria and had a decisive
impact on the monetary and financial reforms of
1922. But he could not prevent the steady increase
of government regulations and the deterioration of
Austria's public finances. He developed an entire
new theory of interventionism showing that
government intervention is inherently
counterproductive. Practically this ruled out all
variants of third-way policies and left
laissez-faire capitalism as the only meaningful
option on the political menu. In 1927, he
published a concise presentation of his
utilitarian political philosophy in Liberalismus. 


In the late 1920s he started publishing papers on
the epistemological character of economics. Von
Mises argued that economic science could not be
verified or refuted through the analysis of
observable data. Economics was an a priori science
like mathematics, logic or geometry. Moreover,
economics was just a part of a larger social
science, which he would later call
"praxeology"—the logic of human action.  

Von Mises eventually found the time to synthesize
the various strands of his work into a
praxeological treatise when, in 1934, he was
called to a chair in international economic
relations at the Graduate Institute for
International Studies in Geneva. He would hold the
chair until 1940, the same year in which his
treatise was finally published under the title
Nationalökonomie. While in Geneva, in 1938, he
married Margit Serény (née Herzfeld), whose
daughter Gitta Serény later became a well-known
author. They had no children from the marriage.  

In July 1940, von Mises left Geneva to avoid being
captured by the Nazis or being delivered to them
by the Swiss government. He moved to New York City
and started a new life, receiving U.S. citizenship
in 1946. Von Mises first found employment with the
National Bureau of Economic Research, then worked
as an advisor for the National Association of
Manufacturers, and eventually became a visiting
professor at New York University in 1945. He would
"visit" with NYU for the next twenty-four years.

== Libertarianism ==

In the U.S. he became the spiritus rector of the
renascent Libertarian movement, to which he gave a
distinct Austrian School flavor. Close ties to the
Foundation for Economic Education, the William
Volker Fund, and the Earhart Foundation gave him
the necessary organizational and financial
backing. Von Mises's influence reached a peak in
the years following the publication of the English
version of his praxeological treatise under the
title Human Action (1949). In the 1950s, his NYU
seminar produced many important intellectual
leaders of postwar Libertarianism, such as Murray
Rothbard, Hans Sennholz, George Reisman, Ralph
Raico, Leonard Liggio, and Israel Kirzner. 
  
In the 1960s, von Mises's vigor and productivity
declined very considerably. He taught at NYU until
1969 and died at St. Vincent's Hospital in New
York City. For almost four decades, he had been
the uncontested dean of the Austrian School of
economics. His legacy as a social philosopher
inspired a thriving movement.  

Among his published works are: Human Action, The
Theory of Money and Credit, Bureaucracy
(book)|Bureaucracy, Socialism, and The
Anti-Capitalistic Mentality.

Lew Rockwell was inspired to found the Ludwig von
Mises Institute in 1982 with the consent of von
Mises' widow.

==See also==
*Libertarianism
*Contributions to liberal theory
*Richard von Mises - Ludwig's brother
*Ludwig von Mises Institute
*List of Austrian scientists
*List of Austrians
*Austrian School

==External links==

* http://www.mises.org/misesbib.asp The Complete
Mises Bibliography from the Ludwig von Mises
Institute
* http://www.mises.org/mises.asp Biography from
the Ludwig von Mises Institute
*
http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Social_Sciences/Econom
ics/Schools_of_Thought/Austrian_School/People/Mise
s,_Ludwig_von/ Open Directory Project list of
links
* http://wwwold.ufm.edu.gt/vonmises.htm Biblioteca
Ludwig von Mises
* http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1702
Mises on Keynes 1927 review by Mises on a lecture
given by Keynes in Berlin
* http://www.mises.org/ Ludwig von Mises Institute
* http://www.mises.org/misestributes/misesjgh.asp
Bio by Mises scholar Jörg Guido Hülsmann  

===Online e-books===
* von Mises, Ludwig (1949).
http://www.mises.org/humanaction.asp Human Action:
A treatise on economics (4th edition, 1996). San
Francisco: Fox & Wilkes. ISBN 0-930073-18-5.  Made
available online by The Ludwig von Mises
Institute.
*
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/pdf/HumanActionSc
holars.pdf Human Action: The Scholars Edition
Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute, 1999. Re-issue
of the classic 1949 Edition with new introduction
and expanded index.

*
http://www.mises.org/etexts/mises/critique/content
s.asp A Critique of Interventionism, The Ludwig
von Mises Institute.
* http://www.mises.org/etexts/mises/anticap.asp
The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Libertarian Press
1990.
* http://www.mises.org/efandi.asp Economic Freedom
and Interventionism, The Ludwig von Mises
Institute.
* http://www.mises.org/etexts/ecopol.asp ECONOMIC
POLICY Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow Second
Edition, with a New Introduction by Bettina Bien
Greaves, The Ludwig von Mises Institute.
* http://www.mises.org/hsofase.asp The Historical
Setting of the Austrian School of Economics, The
Ludwig von Mises Institute.
* http://www.mises.org/liberal.asp Liberalism: In
the Classical Tradition, English edition Copyright
1985 The Foundation for Economic Education,
Irvington, NY. Translation by Ralph Raico. Online
edition Copyright The Mises Institute, 2000.

==Notes==
German title Edler


lived|b=1881|d=1973|key=Mises, Ludwig von