Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was an Austrian economist whose defence of free markets shaped the modern Austrian School of economics. Born in 1881 in Lemberg in Austrian Galicia, now Lviv in Ukraine, into a Jewish family ennobled by Emperor Franz Joseph, he was raised in Vienna and earned a doctorate in law and economics from the University of Vienna in 1906.

From 1913 he held a private docentship at the university and worked as senior economist for the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, advising the Austrian government on inflation and reconstruction after the First World War. His 1912 book The Theory of Money and Credit applied marginal utility analysis to monetary economics, and his 1922 work Socialism argued that central planners could not perform rational economic calculation without market prices, opening what became known as the socialist calculation debate.

His private seminar in Vienna during the 1920s and early 1930s drew thinkers including Friedrich Hayek, Fritz Machlup, and Oskar Morgenstern. As Nazi pressure on Austria grew, Mises moved to Geneva in 1934 to teach at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, and in 1940 he emigrated to New York, where he taught at New York University until 1969.

His 1949 treatise Human Action set out his system of praxeology, the deductive study of human choice. He died in New York in 1973 and influenced later libertarian writers including Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, as well as the Mises Institute founded in his name in 1982.

The name Ludwig comes from the Old High German Hludwig, meaning famous warrior. He bore it as a masculine given name long established in German-speaking lands.