New York Circles

Mises’s activities in New York centered on his NYU seminar. By the early to mid-1950s, four major groups attended the NYU seminar.

A Misesian Treatise

It was in these high years of the new American Misesians— the Human Action years—that Murray Rothbard completed his “textbook” rendering of Austrian economics. At first he stuck to the original project of a mere popularization of Human Action, trying “to do for Mises what McCulloch did for Ricardo.”110 But by October 1952, he had already decided to pursue a more independent exposition of economic science.

Sennholz at Grove City College

While Rothbard was still busy writing and polishing the manuscript of his magnum opus, Hans Sennholz was already a quality product of Mises’s NYU seminar. He had written a very thorough doctoral dissertation and published it in 1955 with Jasper Crane’s Van Nostrand Company.

IN THE EARLY 1950S, Mises’s NYU seminar dealt increasingly with epistemological questions. As he said to Ludwig Lachmann, he felt that the analysis of epistemological problems would be the number one task in the social sciences in the coming years.1 It was the topic of his last two monographs: Theory and History (1957) and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962).

The Argument in a Nutshell

For Mises, the starting point is that “[a]ny epistemological speculation must lead toward determinism.” This is so because the human mind is the instrument through which we learn about all things, and our human mind has a determinist bent. It cannot help thinking that all things are strictly determined by certain causes.

Science and the Culture of Salutary Dissent

As Mises saw it, the task of metaphysics, philosophy, and religion was to slake the unquenchable human thirst for knowledge and certainty. He remarked:

Those divines who saw that nothing but revelation could provide man with perfect certainty were right. Human scientific inquiry cannot proceed beyond the limits drawn by the insufficiency of man’s senses and the narrowness of his mind.14

And even more clearly, a few years later:

Heroic Elites in a Mass Democracy

Yet by the mid-1950s, capitalism and classical liberalism were everywhere on the retreat. How was it possible that the great majority of westerners had forgotten, or failed to appreciate, the most spectacular event of modern history? In Theory and History, Mises outlined his account of the rise and fall of classical liberalism. In the center of his reflection was the relationship between elites and masses, a relationship that he analyzed within the framework of his epistemological reflections.

The Study of History

Mises devoted all of part three to the discussion of the nature, scope, and methods of historical research. This might be surprising from the pen of an economist. But keep in mind that Mises was interested in economics as a tool to guide action. In his early years as a student at the University of Vienna, this practical concern had made him dissatisfied with the methods taught by the Historical School. A passage from Theory and History sums up the problem:

The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality

One year before the publication of Theory and History, Mises had published a short book in applied thymology. Here he dealt with the psychological causes of anti-capitalism—with what he called the Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. It is significant that he published this work only after an exhaustive discussion of the merits of the intellectual case against the market economy. Thymology, we need to keep in mind, was for Mises a residual discipline.

Christianity Reconsidered

One of the most striking features of Theory and History and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science is the frequent allusion to theological problems. At the same time, there is an equally noticeable change of nuance in the discussion of religion, and of the Christian faith in particular.