Conservative Movement and Libertarian Remnant

By the mid-1950s, The Freeman had accomplished its goal of rallying the disparate libertarian forces—“the Remnant” as Albert Jay Nock would call them. Yet its financial and organizational difficulties had opened the gates for another non-leftist periodical, which would consolidate the forces on the American Right from a far less libertarian point of view than The Freeman.

Demise of the Circle Bastiat

The only work that matched Human Action as a literary monument to the libertarian renaissance of the early postwar period was Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. Mises was a great admirer of this work and said so in a letter to its author:

Against the Neo-Liberals

The Mont Pèlerin Society had begun as an “ecumenical” undertaking, bringing together purebred liberals of the classical tradition and neo-liberals, who endorsed interventionist schemes to one degree or another.

MISES REMAINED VIGOROUS UNTIL about 1962. In the early 1960s, he completed four major writing projects and gave several public lectures per year. At his public appearances the frailty of his condition became increasingly obvious. More and more his feeble voice and his virtual deafness weighed against his legendary reputation. He had become a living icon of liberty, yet a fading icon after all.

Last Writings

In the last phase of his life, Mises completed four major writing projects: The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962), the second edition of Human Action (1963), a booklet on the Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics (1969)11, and the third edition of Human Action (1966). Apart from this, Mises produced a few articles.

Last Skirmishes with the Anarchists

In 1949, Mises had defined freedom by stating that a “man is free as far as he can live and get on without being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions on the part of other people.”24 The crucial word here is “arbitrary”—a term that was left undefined and that the young anarchists had interpreted in their way. In 1963, therefore, Mises set out to give more meat to his theory. He wrote:

Last Skirmishes with the Monetarists

Rothbard’s apparent decline was not the main worry for the aging Mises. He followed with great concern how the American monetary system, and the global monetary system built on it, unraveled all through the 1960s. In the middle of the decade, the alarm bells were ringing at the headquarters of the U.S. monetary authorities. Foreign central banks and individuals were following the lead of France in redeeming dollars in gold. The United States government’s stock of gold shrank on a daily basis and at an accelerating rate.

Last Honors

On October 20, 1962, Mises received the Austrian Medal of Honor (Ehrenzeichen) at the Austrian embassy in Washington. He had the embassy invite Otto Kallir for the luncheon. They also asked some of his other former students, probably those residing in Washington.51 In June 1963, he obtained an honorary doctorate from NYU; in 1964, an honorary doctorate in political science from University of Freiburg (Hayek was there during those years).

If ever it could be said that one man stood against the ideological tide of an era, that was von Mises. But whether his efforts have turned that tide is a question to be resolved in the future by those who understand his theories and share his love of liberty.1