A Neo-Liberal Coup in Germany

The 1947 Mont Pèlerin Society meeting was enough to satisfy Mises’s curiosity about Europe and European scholars for quite some time. Europe lay in shambles; even Paris was in rags. He did not even wish to think about traveling to Austria. All that was good and memorable about Europe was in the past. No need for him to return to the old continent just to witness the misery induced by those very statist follies he had spent a lifetime fighting.

A New Yorker

After a brief return to Manhattan, Mises went to Mexico City for the month of August to lecture at the Asociacion Mexicana de Cultura. He and Margit arrived on the night of July 29, and he soon started his twelve-session course on economic theory, seasoned with a survey of the past 200 years of European history and excursions into the history of thought.

BY THE LATE 1940S, Mises was well integrated in the emerging network of American libertarians. His NYU seminar, his lectures at Mont Pèlerin Society meetings and other conferences, and his writings had established his impact on the rising generation. And even beyond the circles of organized libertarianism he had gained a nationwide reputation as an economist and social analyst of the first order, though for most academics his methods and political orientation smacked too much of times past.

First Reactions

Neither Mises nor his friends expected the success the book would have. After his return from Mexico, Mises left for a two-week vacation in the Berkshire Mountains.2 The book was released to the bookshops while he was away, on September 14, 1949. In his weekly Newsweek column, Henry Hazlitt announced and praised it, anticipating the role it would play in subsequent events:

Misesians

Mises and his circle of friends were not the only libertarians who had not believed Human Action could become a bestseller. Herbert C. Cornuelle and the people at the Volker Fund had sensed that the Misesian edifice was too intellectual to be digested by the general American public. What was needed was a more boiled-down version of the book, which would facilitate the penetration of the message into the larger public. But who could write such a work?

Speeches and Papers

Encouraged by the success of Human Action, Mises turned again to fighting the prevailing ideology of interventionism.

The Freeman

The success of Human Action prompted the creation of another important libertarian institution. Mises had long been arguing the need for a free-market journal of opinion. Now organizers, journalists, and, especially, financial backers rallied to establish such a journal. Its explicit purpose would be to promote the ideas Mises stood for. The Austrian economist became the intellectual standard-bearer of The Freeman, which reinforced the infant network of Mises’s NYU seminar, FEE, and the Mont Pèlerin Society.

The Nymeyer Connection

Frederick Nymeyer had printed one thousand copies of “The Economics of the Middle-of-the-Road Policy,” which he distributed for free among his fellow Calvinists. The campaign had a resounding echo. A few months later, the Edison Company ordered 3,100 copies, the Norfolk and Western Railway Company ordered 800 copies, and other orders followed.70 At least one copy had found its way over the Atlantic and fell on fertile ground.

American Edition of Theory of Money and Credit

The success of Human Action paved the way for a new edition of The Theory of Money and Credit in 1953. By the late 1940s, the book had been out of print for some years.80Nymeyer was willing to publish a new edition, but Mises chose the more prestigious Yale University Press, which was interested in publishing more of its bestselling author. In true Christian spirit, Nymeyer promoted the book through a flyer campaign.

Grey Eminence and Itinerant Scholar

The success of Human Action was not the only instance of Mises’s influence on the libertarian movement and on the American Right in general. Another factor was, ironically, his relative isolation among academic economists. By the late 1940s, Mises was already the odd man out in both his methods of research and his political orientation.