October 1, 2023
After the great Robert Tollison passed away a few years ago, I remember reading the following anecdote.
A grad student passing by Tollison’s office asked him, “Dr. Tollison, have you ever read Human Action?” Of course, he was asking about Ludwig von Mises’ magnum opus.
“Read it?!” retorted Tollison, apparently annoyed. “Of course, I’ve read it! All good economists have read it.”
It’s an illuminating anecdote for pushing back on a popular narrative that Mises was entirely ignored by the economics profession of his day. At least to Tollison, Mises was in the bloodstream of all good, latter 20th-century economists.
Who else was obviously impacted by Mises? How about…
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Armen Alchian. In the 1950’s, Alchian led a Volker Fund conference which was attended by Henry Manne, 1986 Nobel Prize winning economist James Buchanan, Harold Demsetz (over 85k citations on Google Scholar), and Israel Kirzner. The (only) assigned text was Mises’ Human Action. Alchian’s famous paper, “Some Economics of Property Rights,” was inspired by his reading of Mises’ discussion of private property rights. Alchian is the co-author (with Demsetz) of one of the most cited papers ever published in the American Economic Review—a mind-boggling 22+k cites!
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Gordon Tullock. A co-founder of Public Choice economics with James Buchanan. Revolutionized economists’ thinking about politics. Tens of thousands of citations and possibly the most notable economist to not be awarded the Nobel Prize. He had no economics PhD, but reading Human Action (three times) at the start of his career was the inspiration for him to take economics to areas where it hadn’t gone before.
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F.A. Hayek. Awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974 for “the theory of money and economic fluctuations.” Where did he get the theory referenced? He developed and expanded the theory Mises expounded in his 1912 The Theory of Money and Credit. Hayek is the second most cited economist in the acceptance speeches of other Nobel Prize winners.
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Vernon Smith. Awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 and over 55k citations on Google Scholar. As an undergraduate in engineering at Caltech, Smith decided to become an economist upon reading Mises’ Human Action. Here are Smith’s “Reflections on Mises’ Human Action After Fifty Years.”
Scholars may quibble with the directions these scholars took Mises’ contributions. I certainly don’t agree with every word they wrote or every perspective they advanced. But that’s also not my point. It’s not a stretch to say that these—and countless others who shaped 20th century economics—simply wouldn’t have done what they did without Mises.
Why, then, do so many popular commentators keep mis-categorizing Mises as a dogmatist or an ideologue or more generally something short of a perceptive, analytical, scientific thinker?
At some point, the ignorance becomes willful.
Frustration over this point is I why I appreciated these snippets from a lengthy monograph I’m currently reviewing:
“Despite Mises’s already strong priors as a liberal, it is important to stress that he was even more committed, perhaps because of his own strong commitments, to the Weberian strategy of bringing dispassionate scientific analysis to heated public policy disputes, and in a way that could produce resolutions between the different parties to the dispute. Moral disputes and condemnations tended to fail to produce any common ground. The business of the social scientist, according to Max Weber’s strict value-freedom argument, is to treat ends as given, and not to question them, and instead limits one’s critical analysis only to the assessment of the efficacy of the chosen means (policies) to achieve these given ends (improved common welfare). This was positive economics prior to positivistic philosophy of science, which would emerge during this period from the Vienna Circle.”
“…if Mises’s challenge was not such a strong one both in terms of nature of the claim, but more importantly in the elementary logic of his presentation, then the list of leading economists and the subsequent literature devoted to refuting his argument would simply be unexplainable. In short, this was not the ravings of an ideological madman who could be easily dismissed, but instead a bold counter-argument written in a way that met the argumentative standards of philosophical engagement and challenged the presumptions of the socialist economists of his and subsequent generations to come.”
“…all systems of social cooperation must have some mechanism that enables the system itself to sort from imagined normatively desired states to feasible states, and furthermore from feasible to viable. We must move the discourse from imagined futures to possible worlds. Nirvana is not an option for humanity, so in contemporary philosophical parlance, ideal theorizing must be disciplined by social science so we get non-ideal theorizing as a guide to the “desirable”. Marx was critical of utopian socialists, and so must we be today. And, certainly Mises was in his time.”
All reasons to be proud that my alma mater and employer—Grove City College—awarded Mises an honorary doctorate in 1957.
