5. Early Professions

FROM CHILDHOOD, MISES HAD been driven by a progressive outlook and a strong personal urge to contribute to the improvement of the world. Scion of an elevated Jewish family successfully established in post-1867 Vienna, product of a liberal education, he believed that artists and men of science formed the avant-garde of social progress.¹ Enlightenment through scientific discoveries was paramount for the further development of humanity. Mises maintained an unconditional affirmation of truth and intellectual integrity as supreme values, even though this uncompromising stance hurt his career and other material interests. As a consequence, he faced the problems of his time in a series of isolated one-man struggles. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn writes:

He never fully belonged to a specific camp. He was always a square peg in a round hole.... To make matters worse, Mises was consciously a nobleman, a true gentleman, who rejected all compromise and never concealed his thoughts or his convictions. If somebody or something was plainly stupid, he said so, nor could he tolerate cowardice or ignorance... this aristocratic Jewish intellectual was an “odd man out,” and fit into no established pattern.²

These qualities made a career difficult in Vienna. The inhabitants of the Austrian capital were famous for their sophisticated taste, humor, and fondness of the pleasures their city could offer, but they were not known for candor or courage, and they openly despised those who displayed the qualities they lacked—especially upstarts from the provinces. A keen connoisseur of the Austrian mind recalls the mentality in the city on the Danube:

People who had their own views and—horribile dictu—even championed these views were not well received. One had to be “popular” to be welcome, and appreciation was given, not to effort, but only to success, not to a man himself, but only to his position.³

Clearly, Vienna did not provide a favorable climate for Mises's talents, but he made good use of them anyway, thanks to immense willpower and his unconditional devotion to truth, which earned the admiration even of those who resented his brazenness.

It was this fundamental attitude—to stick to his convictions at all costs—that had made him receptive to the message of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. These thinkers had developed economic theory on fact rather than fancy, and as Mises's own work in the historicist tradition had shown him, the methodology of the German mainstream economists was sterile. Ludwig Pohle, the famous critic of the historicists, quoted a satirical magazine that described economic research as the activity of “measuring worker's apartments and stating that they were too small.”⁴

When Mises completed his graduate studies in February 1906, he had likely made plans to continue scientific research in some form. At that point he was thoroughly conversant with the Austrian School and with some of the more serious problems left unsolved in the existing literature. He had realized, in particular, that no follower of Carl Menger's had offered a satisfactory integration of the theory of money into the general framework of Menger's theory. This had exposed the Austrian theory to some vigorous criticism, most notably from the German economist Karl Helfferich, who claimed that the theory of money could not be reconciled with Menger's theory of value.⁵ Mises dedicated the next five years of his life to filling the gap with a systematic treatise on money that he planned to submit to the University of Vienna as his Habilitation thesis.

The Habilitation degree was granted on the basis of a comprehensive, scholarly work that not only covered a large field of knowledge and demonstrated the author's ability to shed light on the phenomena under consideration, but also made significant contributions to present knowledge. The idea was that the authorities of the science recognize the candidate as one of their peers. This recognition was far from perfunctory: the Habilitation laureates were entitled to apply for full-professorships within the university system, on a par with more senior candidates.

But first the book had to be written and the necessary research to be done. In those days, such an enterprise required unusual private financial means or unusual energy. There were no university positions for these young scholars to earn a living while they pursued a long-term research project. They were private scholars with only loose university affiliations; they could hope for academic employment only after the successful completion of a Habilitation thesis. Meanwhile they had to survive a prolonged period of professional and material insecurity. If they could not rely on their family, or did not wish to do so, they had to earn their living in some other occupation while pursuing scholarship at night. This was science the hard way, and it was Mises's way from March 1906 until December 1911, when he finally sent his completed manuscript to the publisher.

He took the hard times lightly. He was a young man full of energy and enthusiasm for his science. Would he have despaired if he had known that this was how his life would be for almost 30 years? He later admitted that it was hopeless for him to obtain one of the few positions at a German or Austrian university. At one point he observed, sarcastically: “I was ill-suited to teach the Royal-Prussian Police-Science.”⁶ But even in his youth, he had to realize that he would have to make his way without public support. Austria had produced many geniuses only to confine them to lives of independent scholarship. Pioneers like Mendel and Gumplowicz never held university positions. The Austrian government “dismissed from teaching Bolzano and Brentano; it isolated Mach, and did not at all care for Husserl, Breuer and Freud. It appreciated Böhm-Bawerk as a capable official; not as an economist.”⁷

However, these failed careers did not deter Mises—or thousands of like-minded young men—from following their examples. Posterity would honor them, they were sure, just as the present society honored the heroes of the past. Books, monuments, and street names were dedicated to scientists and artists who were ignored in their day. The result of their sacrifices was an explosion of creative energies in virtually all fields of human endeavor that made Vienna's glory in the decades before the national socialists rose to power.

The intellectual explosion in Vienna was already visible when young Mises prepared for the life of a private scholar, ready to earn his living in some liberal profession. Scholarly pursuits would be his real life—the one that would give significance to all other activities. His “professional life” would be secondary, a day job to pay the bills. And thus he began, on March 15, 1906, a paid internship with the fiscal administration of Lower Austria in its Vienna district headquarters.⁸