Mises (1881–1973) is one of the sleeping giants of the 20th century. For many decades he was the leader of the Austrian School of economic and social thought but he is scarcely a household name, even among economists and classical liberals.
Schumpeter is properly assiduous about Smith. He obviously had total contempt for Smith, and for good reason. And he hates Ricardo — that's another great thing about Schumpeter. His hatred of Ricardo shines through.
Paul Krugman is despairing of late, because a growing number of mainstream economists are adopting (versions of) Austrian business-cycle theory. The most recent convert is Minneapolis Fed president Narayana Kocherlakota.
If we were to award a prize for "brilliancy" in the history of economic thought, it would surely go to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the baron de l'Aulne (1727–1781). His career in economics was brief but brilliant and in every way remarkable.
Mises was the premier Austrian economist of his generation, whose legacy reveals him to be the greatest economist of the 20th century. Almost singlehandedly, he kept the embers of free-market economics burning during the interwar years.
Public opinion looks askance at wealth acquired in trade and industry, and finds it pardonable only if the owner atones for it by endowing charitable institutions.
But what both the classical and the historical schools have neglected, the Austrian School is today trying to accomplish.
We may either incorporate ourselves into market civilization, the system by which we may serve ourselves as ends by serving other people as means, or return to the idyllic and isolated "noble" savagery that long characterized our human past.
The question of the relation of cost to value is properly only a concrete form of a much more general question — the question of the regular relations between the values of such goods as in causal interdependence contribute to one and the same utility for our well-being.
