Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises, one of the most preeminent economist and social philosopher of the 20th century, was on September 29, 1881, into a wealthy Jewish family to parents Arthur Edler von Mises and Adele von Mises in Galicia, Austria-Hungary. Arthur worked as a construction engineer with the Czernowitz railroad company. In 1900, Ludwig enrolled in University of Vienna where he became incredibly influenced by the teachings of Carl Menger. In 1904, he started taking lectures by Austrian economist, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, who inspired him for years to come. In 1906, he received his doctorate from the school of law and began his career as a municipal servant in Austria’s fiscal administration department. However, he resigned from this post a few months later as he got offered the position of a trainee in a Vienna law firm.
In 1909, Ludwig von Mises was appointed at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where he worked for next 25 years. In 1912, Mises began penning a monologue on money and banking titled ‘Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel’. When the World War I broke out, he enlisted himself and was employed as a front officer in the Austro-Hungarian weaponry and later, given the post of an economic consultant to the War Department.
In 1919, he published another book by the name of ‘Nation, Staat und Wirtschaft’ and also penned one of his most celebrated essays on ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth’, in which he highlight the fact that a communist leadership would fail to regulate the nation’s resources. In 1922, he authored a thesis on socialism, ‘Die Germeinwirtschaft’, which influenced a number of budding intellectuals such as F.A. Hayek and Wilhelm Röpke. In the 1920s, he played a major role in tackling the problems of inflation in Austria by suggesting a series of fiscal reforms in the country.
The year 1927 saw the release of another book by Ludwig von Mises, ‘Liberalismus’, which appeared as a blunt confirmation of his no-frills partisan ideologies. He also published papers on the ‘Epistemological Problems of Economics’. In 1934, he was offered a position at the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva which he held for the next six years.
In 1940, he published an essay titled, ‘Nationalökonomie’, which influenced a great deal of thinkers worldwide. The same year, he left Geneva for United States to avoid persecution at the hand of the Nazis due to his Jewish ancestry. In the US, he worked at the ‘National Bureau of Economic Research’ and later his services were employed as a consultant for the ‘National Association of Manufacturers’. In 1945, he was offered a post as a visiting professor at the New York University where he taught for the next twenty years. His works began to be translated to other languages, particularly his paper, ‘Human Action’ translated in 1949, had as an overwhelming influence on the rising liberalists. His fame as a social and economic philosopher reached new heights.
In the 1950s his health began to decline, therefore in 1959 at the age of 87, he retired from teaching and settled in New York. In 1962, he was awarded ‘Austrian Decoration for Science and Art’ by the Austrian Embassy in Washington D.C. Ludwig von Mises died on October 10, 1973 at the age of 92, in New York and was burried at Ferncliff Cemetery. In light of his extremely valuable contributions to the field of economics, he was named ‘Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association’ in 1969.