Notes and Recollections: With the Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics

Ludwig von Mises

Written between 1940 and 1941, shortly after he arrived in the United States, Notes and Recollections is in effect Mises’s pre-1940 intellectual autobiography. This work reveals how Mises developed his theories, wrote his books, lectured, and taught; it describes his life in Vienna and the people with whom he worked. He also discusses his activities as an adviser to Austrian government officials and his frustrations in attempting to keep inflation and communist and Nazi ideas from destroying the Austrian economy.

The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics is an essay originally published in English in 1969 that reveals Mises’s intellectual development in the context of the origins of the Austrian School. It serves as a good introduction to the theory and history of the Austrian School.

As Mises explains in these two works, his viewpoint that modern economics is based on subjective value and marginal-utility theory separated him from classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill.

This is Mises’s intellectual biography, written after he arrived in the U.S. It was written at the lowest point of his career, at a time when he had left his homeland and was snubbed by American academia for being too anti-socialist. But his steely determination to press on is evident on every page of this affecting, personal, and powerful book.

 

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Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises

루드비히 폰 미제스는 20세기 가장 저명한 경제학자이자 사회 철학자들 중의 한 분이다. 그의 긴 그리고 생산성 높은 삶 속에서 그는 개별 인간은 자신이 원하는 목표를 달성하기 위하여 목적 지향적으로 행동한다는 공리(公理)를 바탕으로 해서 경제학을 융합적이고 연역적인 과학으로 발전시켰다. 그의 경제분석 자체는 (경제학자들이 갖고 있는 가치와는 상관 없다는 의미에서) ‘가치 중립적’이였을 지라도, 미제스는 인류를 위해 실용적인 유일한 경제정책은 어떤 제한도 없는 자유방임, 자유시장, 그리고 어떤 방해도 받지 않는 사유재산권 행사의 정책이라고 결론 내렸다. 정부의 역할은 그 나라의 영토 안에 있는 사람과 재산을 보호하는 데에만 엄격하게 제한되어야 한다고 했다.

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