One of the many fascinating footnotes in Dr. Hulsmann’s Mises - Last Knight of Liberalism is this entry: “The uniqueness of Mises’s role was still recognized some twenty years later by one of the last surviving students of the French laissez faire school. Writing to Mises in September 1957, the professor A. Bastet said that Mises was the successor “to our master Yves Guyot” - who himself was the successor to Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912).
Dentist offices have been sued. Super Bowl parties have been canceled. Coffee shops have been harassed. Elvis impersonators have been sent nasty-grams. So who is next in line for IP litigation?
How did the Mises Institute come to be the publisher of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism? Clearly a book of this level of significance, one might suppose, would be published by the likes of Chicago, or Oxford, or Cambridge. How and why did we end up doing it “in house,” so to speak?
It’s a fascinating story that gets to the heart of the current upheaval in publishing, made possible by new technology and also the increasing market strength of small publishers such as the Mises Institute.
The Verein fur Socialpolitik or Association for Social Policy is a central character in the early chapters of the Hulsmann Mises biography. An important thing intellectual history can do is put contextual substance back into sterile formulations of abstract principles which lack much of their conceptual significance outside of a real scientific — and social — problematic. A case in point is the notion of value free social science.
A Russian correspondent sent me a translation of a Russian blog entry by Marina Litvinovich, an opposition politican and journalist in Russia:
The current ‘civil war between Auburn & Fairfax’ ( Mark Sunwall’s apt description), was sparked off by Peter Boettke’s judgment that “[Don Lavoie] understood Mises better than all but two other Austrian economists (Israel Kirzner and Richard Ebeling).” Naturally this proved intolerable to some ‘Auburnites’. Let me now suggest a via media: let us begin with the intellectual system of Mises himself.
NPR had a recent story on the National Transportation Safety Board, profiling two of its investigators. The story provides a clear window into the inner workings of our federal government. Certainly, some will listen in pride as the investigators allude to the value they and government provide. Yet, the free market ear will reveal a whole lot of nothing. The first segment of the report focused on just one of the many NTSB employees investigating the collapse of the I-35 bridge.
Interesting post and debate on methodology at Peter Boettke’s blog. See the comments especially. And here is my paper on this subject from 21 years ago.
