Notes and Recollections: With the Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics

Ludwig von Mises was the leading exponent of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century. He has long been regarded as a most knowledgeable and respected economist, even though his teachings were generally outside the mainstream. He wrote twenty-five books and hundreds of articles on human action, free markets, and political economy. Mises's Notes and Recollections and The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics are published together here for the first time. Mises wrote Notes and Recollections in German shortly after he arrived in the United States in 1940, and he gave the manuscript to his wife, Margit, for safekeeping. After Mises died in 1973, she read tire manuscript and asked Professor Hans Sennholz to translate it. Notes and Recollections is in effect Mises's pre-1940 intellectual autobiography: it tells how he developed his theories, wrote his books, lectured, and taught, and it describes his life in Vienna and the people with whom he worked. In her foreword, Mrs. Mises writes about the pessimism of this work: "Never before had he written such candid, harsh, devastating remarks and observations about economic conditions, the universities, the professors, and well-known public personalities in Austria and Germany. … In retrospect, I would say, he never again wrote in this way. … But never, never would he stop warning against inflation, interventionism and communism." The postscript by Professor Sennholz describes Mises's later years and works. The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics is a long essay first published in English in 1969. As does Notes and Recollections, it reveals Mises's intellectual development, but here the evolution of his thought is put in the context of the origins of the Austrian School of economics. It serves as a good introduction to the theory of the Austrian School as well as to its history. Formerly a resident scholar, trustee, and longtime staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education, Bettina Bien Greaves has written and lectured extensively on topics of free market economics. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Human Events, Reason, and The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. A student of Mises, Greaves has become an expert on his work in particular and that of the Austrian school of economics in general. She has translated several Mises monographs, compiled an annotated bibliography of his work, and edited collections of papers by Mises and other members of the Austrian School.