person
Ludwig von Mises
Austrian-American economist (1881–1973). Principal twentieth-century theorist of the Austrian tradition. Articulated the mature form of the Austrian business-cycle theory, initiated the socialist calculation debate, and produced the systematic statement of praxeological economics in *Human Action* (1949).
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Ludwig von Mises spent his early career in Vienna (the Austrian Chamber of Commerce; the famous private seminar at his offices in the 1920s and 1930s), emigrated to Switzerland in 1934 and to the United States in 1940, and held an unpaid visiting professorship at NYU from 1945 to 1969. The Theory of Money and Credit (1912) gave the Austrian business-cycle theory its mature form. Socialism (1922) initiated the socialist calculation debate by arguing that rational economic calculation is impossible without market prices for the means of production. Human Action (1949) is the systematic statement of the praxeological method — economics derived deductively from the axiom of purposive human action.
His students and intellectual successors — Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Israel Kirzner, Hans Sennholz — carried the Austrian program into the postwar period in forms ranging from Hayek’s price-system epistemology (which became the most influential branch in mainstream reception) to Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalist politics (which became the most influential branch in libertarian political-economy thought).