On August 3, 1940, a mere six months into World War II, Ludwig von Mises arrived with his wife in New York City.
The fifty-eight-year-old Austrian economist had narrowly escaped Europe as the continent was engulfed by war. Because air travel was not an option amid the escalating fighting, the couple had to cross by bus from their home in Geneva, Switzerland, across southern France, into Spain, and eventually to a port in Portugal, where a ship would take them across the Atlantic.
The bus had to stop and reroute several times to narrowly avoid the advancing Nazi forces pushing into France. An invading army is dangerous to anyone attempting to flee in its path. But Mises was also a known Jewish intellectual opponent of the ideology fueling the German war effort.
Fortunately, the bus made it through France and Mises made it to America. But when he got there, his difficulties were just beginning.
He had no job, no serious prospects, and no ability to meaningfully continue his scholarship. More urgently, he and his wife had very little money. They rented a room in a hotel and did what they could to make ends meet while Mises searched for work.
That is, of course, a difficult situation. But it goes a lot deeper than that. It’s worth reflecting—as he surely was at the time—on how much his entire world had collapsed.
Mises had, in fact, been a highly influential economic scholar back in Europe. Raised and educated in Vienna, he had studied at the University of Vienna—the first genuine hub of the then-new Austrian School of Economics. After he quickly grew frustrated with the limitations and flaws of the so-called Historical School, Mises read Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics.
Realizing that real-world economic phenomena could be analyzed systematically, Mises sought out and studied under the Mengerian economists in the department. He attended Eugen Böhm-Bawerk’s seminar, where he immersed himself in the Austrian system and thrived in a highly intellectual circle that developed economic theory through sustained, in-person argument rather than merely through gradual journal publications.
At thirty, Mises published his first major masterpiece, a treatise on money and fiduciary media that—for the first time—integrated money and banking into the Mengerian theory of subjective value and market prices. The Theory of Money and Credit also laid the groundwork for Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). The book was highly acclaimed and landed Mises a teaching job at the University of Vienna.
Then, after fighting in World War I as an artillery officer, Mises returned to Vienna and purportedly turned the Austrian Left away from an attempt to import Russian-style Bolshevism through his friendship with Otto Bauer—a fellow student who had become a dominant left-wing figure. And, around the same time, Mises was brought in to advise the government as inflation grew out of control. His firm insistence that money printing was the cause, along with the prestige his position in the Chamber of Commerce gave him, were almost certainly significant factors that saved Austria from the hyperinflation that gripped post-war Germany. Unlike many scholars, he was making a real difference in the world.
Then came Mises’s attack on socialism. In the 1920s, as socialism was rising not just in Russia but in economics departments at universities worldwide, Mises delivered what was arguably one of the most devastating arguments in economic intellectual history. He shifted the debate from questions of morality and distributive preference towards the very possibility of meaningful socialist economic planning.
His argument, laid out first in an article and then later expanded on in a book, simply stated that because economic calculation relies on market prices, it could not occur in a socialist system defined by the abolition of the only mechanisms that can generate meaningful market prices. This simple yet profound insight eviscerated the economic arguments for socialism so thoroughly that socialist intellectuals have still not fully recovered nearly a hundred years later. To this day, it’s rare to find a significant socialist presence in economics departments. Socialist scholars are mostly spread across other fields in the humanities, making non-economic, increasingly cultural or grievance-based arguments for their preferred system. That, in a lot of ways, is thanks to Mises.
However, these moments of triumph would not last. As the 20s gave way to the 30s, Mises was forced to watch the liberalism he had worked so hard to advocate for retreat as the interventionist ideologies of socialism and fascism he had worked so hard to defeat advanced, and the world, gripped by the Depression, descended toward war.
Not letting that discourage him, Mises took a job in Geneva and poured his effort into his most ambitious work yet: a treatise that would attempt to logically deduce the entire system of economics, step by step, into a single cohesive volume. That book, Nationalökonomie, was, in every sense of the word, groundbreaking. But the timing could not have been worse.
Published at the beginning of 1940, Mises’s great treatise was essentially swallowed by the war. The means to print and distribute it were all but gone, copies sent to colleagues disappeared, and—most importantly—the ideas it embodied seemed utterly irrelevant in the raging ideological war for Europe’s future. Months later, Mises and his wife fled to New York.
So, as Mises was struggling to find money and work after arriving in the US, he wasn’t merely navigating a career slump. He was fighting to continue on as an isolated, nearly sixty-year-old scholar who had devoted his life to an intellectual tradition that had been completely routed politically. On top of that, his home country, Austria, was gone, having been annexed by Germany two years earlier. The Nazis had seized his apartment and all the possessions he still had there. The book that was supposed to be his masterpiece was dead on arrival thanks to the war and the intellectual climate that had brought it about. And the Keynesian-obsessed economics departments of American universities showed no interest in giving Mises or his “antiquated” worldview an academic home. Continuing to study and advocate for laissez-faire economics was, by all indications, utterly pointless in the world of 1940.
Remarkably, given all that, Mises did not even seem to consider giving up. But that was not enough. His determination mattered, but it wasn’t enough to get him back in the intellectual fight. Which brings us to a regrettably under-covered but immensely important part of Mises’s story: the people who came together to buy him time to work.
It didn’t happen quickly or neatly. But eventually, the knowledge that Ludwig von Mises himself was in New York, struggling to get by, spread throughout the small remnant of American free-marketers that remained. And a few decided it was worth doing something about it.
It began with a man named Joseph Willits who used his position managing funds at the Rockefeller Foundation, of all places, to authorize a small stipend for Mises at the end of 1940 that lasted for three years. That money—along with a handful of speaking fees and some money for published editorials—gave Mises some much-needed breathing room, though times were still extremely tight. Then, at the beginning of 1943, Noel Sargent of the National Association of Manufacturers secured consulting work for Mises. He helped prepare studies and served on some NAM advisory bodies.
Although, again, it was not much, the money Mises earned from his consulting work, combined with his stipend, gave him room to continue his intellectual work. The sixty-year-old economist, who had written his first masterpiece, The Theory of Money and Credit, while working a day job, was able to write and publish two books with the spare time his economic benefactors made possible: Bureaucracy and Omnipotent Government.
Then came the real lifeline. Thanks to the efforts of a man named Lawrence Fertig—who owned a New York advertising business—several other businessmen and admirers of Mises negotiated a privately-financed visiting professorship at NYU. Around the same time, another admirer of Mises, Harold Luhnow, used his position managing a fund set up by his uncle William Volker (who had built his fortune through a Kansas City furniture business) to support Mises’s scholarship.
So, five years after he stepped off the ship in New York Harbor with little money and no job prospects, Mises was a full-time professor at NYU, with the time and resources he needed to get back to the work he had left off back in Europe. He wrote Human Action—an expanded and enhanced version of Nationalökonomie—written in English for the people of his new home country—the country where he saw a future for his intellectual tradition.
And he recreated his seminar from his days in Vienna, finally bringing back the kind of intellectual environment that had allowed the Austrian School of economics to develop and thrive decades earlier. Famously—at least in our circles—that seminar was attended by Murray Rothbard and several other young scholars who would eventually kick off the so-called Austrian revival and carry the Misesian tradition forward to today, where there are, at least, hundreds of hardcore Misesian-Rothbardian scholars all over the world building on, refining, and expanding upon the tradition that Mises had devoted his life to.
But again, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that none of this would have happened if it weren’t for that small handful of men who used the resources at their disposal and, in some cases, their own money and time to give Mises the opportunity to work.
The mostly faceless people who make scholarship materially possible are always too absent from discussions of intellectual history. Gifted scholars alone are not enough to sustain a thriving tradition. To have an impact, scholarship also requires an ecosystem of formalized mentorship, publication, distribution, amplification, popularization, and the funding to make it all possible. We spend a lot of time focusing on the names printed on the covers of the great treatises and books, but a lot of unseen work goes into making those works possible. To frame that in a more positive or, hopefully, actionable way, that also means there’s a lot people can do to help move a tradition forward even if they weren’t born with a mind like Mises or have the time to deal directly in ideas. Many of the most meaningful contributions to a movement aren’t obvious or even visible.
But there’s a more striking component at play in Mises’s story. Because, going back to 1940, when the situation must have seemed utterly hopeless to him, it also almost certainly appeared just as hopeless to the men who decided to support him. And yet they did it anyway.
During some economically perilous years, they decided to invest in a lone thinker of an intellectual movement that could have easily and rationally been considered a lost cause. Because they did not need to be certain about eventual success to recognize something worth carrying forward. They are, in many ways, the invisible heroes of this intellectual tradition.
And they’re not alone. Although this movement is in a far, far better place today than it was back in the 1940s, it has not been smooth sailing. For instance, the Volker Fund collapsed in 1962, just as the American Right was abandoning laissez-faire in favor of Cold War-era Big Government conservatism—leaving scholars like Rothbard with a similarly precarious lack of funding as the cause of liberty seemed to be losing the day. It took men like Kenneth Templeton and Burt Blumert to step in and provide the funding and infrastructure necessary to keep alive a tradition that, once again, seemed completely out of step with the age.
That effort eventually found a lasting institutional home after Lew Rockwell founded the Mises Institute in 1982, made possible by another generation of supporters willing to sustain the work—another collection of people who believed the tradition was worth carrying forward, regardless of how fashionable it seemed at the moment.
We should remember that when our own efforts seem inadequate, and the cause appears hopeless. None of the people who chose to support Mises, Rothbard, or their intellectual peers and heirs had the future consequences of their efforts or their contributions available to them for reassurance.
But the tradition we inherited exists because they refused to let that uncertainty become an excuse to give up or pivot to some less-coherent worldview that seemed more fashionable at the moment. We owe it to the next generation to do the same.
