History of the Austrian School of Economics

Mises was in his prime from 1920-1934 while he was 39-53 years old. Three main areas in these years were certain people, his intellectual contributions, and other work.

Mises left Vienna for six years in Geneva, 1934 – 1940, to write his treatise and leave behind the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party. In Geneva, Mises held the Chair for International Relations.

Mises was not surprised by WWI, 1914-1920.  He was posted on the Northern Front of the Austro-Hungarian towns as a Lieutenant in an artillery unit.

This 1912 book is Mises’ first great theory. Mises agreed with Menger about the spontaneous emergence of money. No government is needed. Mises used a logical proof called the regression theory. It explained why money is demanded in its own right.

Carl Menger (b. 1840) dared to create something he called the Austrian School of Economics. His was a new way of doing economic analysis. He sided with Aristotle’s realism.

Why did Mises do certain things in response to certain events?  This first full biography of Mises seeks to answer those many questions. In the first four chapters, Hulsmann covers Mises’ roots.

There are two main branches of the sciences of human action: praxeology and history.

Finally, I must add that Sennholz has never been shy about insisting on the centrality of ethics in the study of economics. He has decried the welfare state as confiscatory and immoral. He has called inflation a form of theft. He has identified government intervention as coercion contrary to the true spirit of cooperation.

I hold him to have been one of our century's great intellectual figures, whose neglect by mainstream academicians is inexcusable.

Contrary to mainstream thinking, the Austrian framework shows that it is the importance of various ends that determine the selection of goods by individuals. The means-end framework also shows that the prices of goods are not set mechanically by some kind of supply-demand curves but by the goal-seeking choices of individuals.