Last Knight Reviewed yet again

Here: If you’re going to write a biography of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), you have your work cut out for you. You face a mountain of books, articles, speeches, and correspondence by and about the great libertarian economist and his forebears, contemporaries, disciples, and critics, much of it in German. Because his productive career lasted from the 1880s into the 1960s, you have to be thoroughly grounded in the intellectual and political history of that time, sweeping all the way from Marxism, historicism, and fascism, through Keynesianism, and into the beginnings of monetarism. You must be conversant not just with economics, but with history, sociology, and philosophy, since Mises ranged over all these subjects. You must focus on the political and military events that shaped Austria and its neighbors in the early 20th century, because Mises was personally involved in many of them. You must come to grips with terms and concepts that are central to Mises but unknown outside the Austrian School of economics, of which he was a part -- terms such as praxeology, catallactics, thymology, etatism, and Verstehen. Your own prejudices will likely be activated either by Mises’ extreme positions or by an occasional belief that he failed to follow through on his own principles. You must try to divine the mental and emotional life of a man who kept his feelings to himself and whose devoted wife very likely took a number of his personal secrets to her grave. Lastly, you must condense and shape your work into something people will want to read. Jörg Guido Hülsmann has risen to all these challenges and produced “Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism,” a work that is outstanding in several respects, starting with the volume itself. The type face is pleasing, the binding is sturdy, the bibliography is exhaustive: 31 pages, including 73 Mises citations. There are separate subject and name indices, and notes placed where the Lord intended: at the foot of the pages. (While some footnotes are just citations, many are worthwhile amplifications.) Photographs, many never seen before, are sprinkled conveniently through the text, not bunched in the middle. The table of contents hints at the organization of the work, which can be seen as three different books, any of which could exist on its own, woven together like the strands of a rope. Strand A might be called “Mises the Man,” presenting snapshots and stories that illuminate his character. I would call Strand B “The World of Mises,” an account of the impact of local and world events on him, and of his role in shaping some of them. Strand C would be “Mises the Theoretician,” a summary of the principles of Austrian economics and the epistemological foundation that Mises provided for it. The movements from strand to strand help make this book quite readable, despite its 1,100-page length. Chapter 21, for example, “The Epistemological Case for Capitalism,” is a difficult chapter that demands careful attention, but we get a change of pace in the next chapter as Hülsmann switches back to Strand B with “Fragmentation of the Movement.” ...Hülsmann recaps information already available in these works and adds considerable new personal material. In so doing, he conveys a more vivid sense of the man than we have had up to now. He accomplishes this without descending into excessive speculation about Mises’ psychology: his devotion to his mother, his long bachelorhood, or the sacrifices of his wife, before and after their marriage. Hülsmann mentions the relationship between Ludwig and his brother Richard, an accomplished mathematician and aerodynamicist. They were never close, but Hülsmann does not uncover any feuds or animosity. He does find it curious that the chapter in Mises’ “Human Action” about probability theory makes no mention of Richard’s previously published views on the subject, even though the two were in substantial agreement. READ FULL REVIEW