by Rick Lowe
I know I blogged about Mises yesterday, but I couldn't resist this new introduction to the reprint of his book Socialism by Professor Peter Boettke.
By the way, why not join the Laissez Faire Club?…
The Significance of Mises’s Socialism
Peter J. Boettke · September 20, 2012 @ Laissez Faire Today
THAT LUDWIG VON MISES was one of the greatest economists of the 20th century should never be doubted. Mises never worked in scientific or popular obscurity despite various mythologies on left and right that are told. Prior to World War I, Mises had established himself as a leading economic theorist among the younger generation in German-language economics, and in fact in Continental Europe more widely, with The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), and during the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, Mises’s reputation as a theorist and methodologist spread internationally. Leading economic thinkers in England (such as Lionel Robbins) and in the United States (such as Frank Knight) came to study closely Mises’s contributions to economic science, and engage his ideas critically. During this time, Mises’s reputation as an outstanding teacher and mentor of young economists grew as the success of his students, such as F.A. Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, Gottfried Habeler, Felix Kaufman, and Alfred Schutz, spread out from the German-language scientific community throughout Europe and eventually to the international scientific community. In fact, as Henry Simons once remarked, if judged by the contributions of one’s students, Mises must be considered the greatest economic teacher of the first half of the 20th century.
It is important to remind the reader of Mises’s status as an economic thinker because this book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, played a major role in establishing that reputation. Paul Samuelson speculated that had the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences been established when the other prizes were, Mises would have been one of the early recipients. Even though that recognition would in his lifetime elude him, Mises was named in 1969 a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, and he also received his native country’s highest honor for scientific achievement. But Mises’s status as an eminent economist is also evidenced by the fact that he is invoked in various well-known and iconic works, such as Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests or John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, as the quintessential 20th century representative of the laissez-faire position.
Read the entire introduction to the reprint by Professor Boettke here…
