Who was Ludwig von Mises?
von Mises, Ludwig (29 Sept. 1881-10 Oct. 1973), economist and social philosopher, was born Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (today, Lviv, Ukraine), the son of Arthur von Mises, a railroad engineer and civil servant, and Adele von Mises, born Adele Landau. Von Mises was still a small boy when his family moved to Vienna. In 1892 he entered the Akademisches Gymnasium, where he received a humanistic education and befriended Hans Kelsen. Early on, von Mises was particularly interested in history and politics. After graduation, in 1900, he therefore began to study at the department of law and government science of the University of Vienna. Studying under Carl Grünberg, von Mises started off as an exponent of the so-called Historical School of government science, which stressed fact-finding and despised theoretical analysis. But in the fall of 1903 he read Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics, the foundational text of the Austrian School of economics. The book turn
