Although without a doubt one of the most important economists of his generation, in a certain sense Ludwig von Mises remained an outsider in the academic world until the end of his unusually long scholarly career—certainly within the German-speaking world—but also during the last third of his life, when in the United States he raised a larger circle of students.

The first source of my political and historical indoctrination was the Gartenlaube, the periodical of provincial Germany. In 1888, the year of the three kaisers, it ran numerous illustrated features on the lives of the two who had died. Not seven years old at the time, I devoured these articles with great fervor.

The multilingual Hapsburg state could have made itself indispensable to the grand design. It could have created a constitution that enabled people of different tongues to live peacefully under one commonwealth. Perthaler’s constitution of 1867 was an attempt at just that, but it was destined for failure. The Sudetenland’s barons and their dominant party fought liberalism with all means at their disposal.

When I first came to the university, Carl Menger was nearing the end of his teaching career. There was little attention paid the Austrian School of economics at the university, and I had no interest in it at the time.

Around Christmas, 1903, I read Menger’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre1 for the first time. It was through this book that I became an economist.

Karl Helfferich, in his 1903 book, Das Geld, asserted that the theory of marginal utility had failed to solve the problem of money value. I wanted to investigate the validity of this objection. In 1906 I began addressing the problems of money and banking, zealously studying the great theoretical works as well as the history of currencies in European countries, the United States, and British India. I sought to negotiate my way through an abundance of literature.

Ineed not report on the war or on my personal experiences during the war in this work; I concern myself with military questions and with the political only to the extent that they aid in making my aim more accessible.

Before I proceed with a description of my scientific endeavors, I must address my practical activity. From 1909 to 1938 I served with the “Niederösterreichischen Handelsund Gewerbe Kammer.”2 (In 1920 the name of this institution was changed to the “Wiener Kammer für Handel, Gewerbe, und Industrie.”3)

No other calling was as desirable to me as that of a university professor. As a liberal, I recognized early on that I would always be denied a full professorship at a German-speaking university. This was regrettable to me only because it forced me to earn my living through nonacademic work. The title of Privatdozent1 seemed to offer sufficient opportunity for salutary teaching.