Professor Jewell on Hulsmann

July 3, 2008 8:28 AM by Jeffrey Tucker | Other posts by Jeffrey Tucker | Comments (1)

Jason Jewell of Faulkner University reviews Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism in the Journal of Faith and the Academy, Summer 2008:

That it took nearly thirty-five years after Mises's death for the first full-length critical biography of him to be published is an indication of how desperately mainstream economics wishes to ignore his work. But it must be said that Guido Hülsmann's Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, an exhaustively researched treatment of Austria's greatest economist, was worth the wait. It is the product of a decade of combing through obscure archives in several countries and a thorough study of the thought of both Mises and his contemporaries. (It is worth noting that we might still be waiting for this book's appearance had not the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which funded Hülsmann's research, decided to publish it itself instead of turning it over to Columbia University Press or Oxford University Press, both of which wanted the title, but with substantial textual cuts, an astronomical retail price, and a turnaround time of over a year. The Mises Institute's ability to publish the work much more quickly and at a lower cost is indicative of technological changes in the printing world and the growing market share of small, independent publishers.)

Hülsmann divides his text of over 1,000 pages into six chronologically-arranged sections tracing the logical phases of Mises's life: his youth and education; his early work in the so-called Austrian school of economics, which culminated in his first great treatise, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912); his service as an artillery officer in World War I and involvement in the postwar Austrian recovery, including the publication of his second great treatise, Socialism (1922); his most influential years as a teacher and economist in Austria in the 1920s and early 1930s; his years in Switzerland (1934-1940); and, finally, his sojourn in the United States, which included the publication of his third and fourth major treatises, Human Action (1949) and Theory and History (1957). Each of these six sections is subdivided into several chapters, some of which still run to well over fifty pages. Fortunately, Hülsmann has taken pity on his readers and provided helpful subheadings within each chapter which break his content into more digestible units.

An outstanding feature of Mises is Hülsmann's placing of his subject into a well-developed context. For example, he digresses to explain the status of Jews (Mises was Jewish) in Vienna society and Austria-Hungary more generally in the fin de siècle; he also devotes upwards of seventy-five pages to establishing the context of the Austrian school and the important forerunners of Mises, such as Karl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. This survey will help particularly a general readership not already familiar with the methodological differences between Austrian and mainstream neoclassical economics. By the time Hülsmann arrives at a discussion of The Theory of Money and Credit, the reader knows exactly why the work was immediately hailed as a critical breakthrough for its integration of monetary theory into the system of marginalist value theory pioneered by Menger decades earlier.