Ludwig von Mises

In 1938, he married Margit Sereny, who was a widow and a former actress. The couple had no children.

He passed away at the age of 92, in New York and is interred at Ferncliff Cemetery.

After his death, many of his personal papers and works were collected for the archive at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Many other papers were collected for the Special Archive for Historico-Documentary Collections, in Moscow.

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Galicia, Austria-Hungary.

He studied at the University of Vienna in 1900 and was greatly influenced by the works of Carl Menger during his time at the institution. Three years later, tragedy struck the family, when his father, his role model, passed away.

In 1904, he began attending the lectures by Austrian economist, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, who went on to his inspire him in his later years. He continued to attend his lectures for many years to come.

In 1906, he acquired a doctorate from the school of law. After he graduated, he started his career as a municipal servant in Austria’s fiscal administration, resigning after a few months to accept the position of a ‘trainee’ in a Vienna law firm.

In 1909, he joined the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry, with whom he worked for nearly 25 years.

Correspondingly, Mises began to write a discourse on money and banking titled ‘Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel’, in 1912. At the onset of World War I, he was employed as ‘front officer’ in the Austro-Hungarian weaponry and as an economic consultant to the War Department.

During the final years of the war, he was without authorization, appointed as ‘professor extraordinarius’ at the University of Vienna. After the war ended, he was briefly an aide-de-camp member of the newly-formed republican government of German-Austria.

In 1919, he authored, ‘Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft’ and also wrote one of his most famous essays on ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Through this essay, he contended that a communist leadership lacked the vital ingredients for the rational provision of the nation’s resources.

He published a thesis on socialism, ‘Die Germeinwirtschaft’, in 1922, which had a conclusive impact on a number of rising scholars such as F.A. Hayek and Wilhelm Ropke.

‘Liberalismus’, first published in 1927, is considered his magnum opus. This work fortified liberal creed based on individual property rights. The publication, though controversial at the time of its release, was translated to English much later and was titled, ‘The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth’. The publication was widely read in the United States and was made available online by the Ludwig von Mises Institute in the new millennium.

In 1949, von Mises published ‘Human Action: A Treatise on Economics’, which presented his opinions on ‘laissez-faire capitalism’. The work, considered one of his best was re-printed twice at later dates and went on to influence a horde of intellectuals. The publication became so famous that it spawned a number of translations in Italian, Spanish, Czech, Polish, Turkish, Portuguese and Japanese.