Chapter 8 Coda: Mises the Man

Who was Mises the Man? Since his death, some of his most beloved students of the 1920s, particularly F.A. Hayek, have disseminated the view that Mises was “difficult,” “stern,” “severe,” not personally close to his students, and even “personally obnoxious.” These strictures were either given to interviewers, or inserted as barbs in the midst of an effusion of praise for Mises.⁶⁶ But is this the sort of teacher who all of his life had gathered around him enthusiastic admirers and followers? Certainly, I can testify that all his American followers were steeped, not only in admiration for the greatness and rigor of his intellect and creative powers, and for his indomitable courage, but also in love with the sweetness of his soul. And if it is to be thought that somehow his personality had been harsher in the 1920s, what kind of an aloof or impersonal mentor would induce a man like Felix Kaufmann to compose songs in honor of Mises’s seminar?⁶⁷

Not only were we American students deeply stirred by Mises the man, but we all realized that in Mises we were seeing the last trailing clouds of glory of the culture of pre-World War I Old Vienna, a far finer civilization than we will know again. William E. Rappard, a man of Mises’s own age, caught this spirit very well in his tribute to Mises in the Festschrift prepared in 1956. Rappard wrote of Mises that, in the Geneva years,

I very often, and I am afraid, very indiscreetly, enjoyed his company. All those who have ever had a like privilege realize that he is not only one of the keenest analytical minds among contemporary economists, but that he also has at his disposal a store of historical culture, the treasures of which are animated and illuminated by a form of humanity and Austrian wit rarely to be found today on the surface of this globe. In fact, I sometimes wonder, not without fear, whether our generation is not the last to be blessed with what seems to have been a monopoly of pre-war Vienna.⁶⁸

But the finest words of appreciation of Mises the man were delivered in the course of a perceptive and elegantly written tribute to Mises’s ideas by his long-time admirer Professor Ralph Raico:

For over sixty years he was at war with the spirit of the age, and with every one of the advancing, victorious, or merely modish political schools, left and right.

Decade after decade he fought militarism, protectionism, inflationism, every variety of socialism, and every policy of the interventionist state, and through most of that time he stood alone, or close to it. The totality and enduring intensity of Mises’s battle could only be fueled from a profound inner sense of the truth and supreme value of the ideas for which he was struggling. This—as well as his temperament, one supposes—helped produce a definite “arrogance” in his tone (or “apodictic” quality, as some of us in the Mises seminar fondly called it, using one of his own favorite words), which was the last thing academic left-liberals and social democrats could accept in a defender of a view they considered only marginally worthy of toleration to begin with….

But the lack of recognition seems to have influenced or deflected Mises not in the least.⁶⁹

And Professor Raico concludes with this marvelous and discerning passage:

No appreciation of Mises would be complete without saying something, however inadequate, about the man and the individual. Mises’s immense scholarship, bringing to mind other German-speaking scholars, like Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter, who seemed to work on the principle that someday all encyclopedias might very well vanish from the shelves; the Cartesian clarity of his presentations in class (it takes a master to present a complex subject simply); his respect for the life of reason, evident in every gesture and glance; his courtesy and kindliness and understanding, even to beginners; his real wit, of the sort proverbially bred in the great cities, akin to that of Berliners, or Parisians and New Yorkers, only Viennese and softer—let me just say that to have, at an early point, come to know the great Mises tends to create in one’s mind life-long standards of what an ideal intellectual should be. These are standards to which other scholars whom one encounters will never be equal, and judged by which the ordinary run of university professor—at Chicago, Princeton, or Harvard—is simply a joke (but it would be unfair to judge them by such a measure; here we are talking about two entirely different sorts of human beings).

When Mises died, and I was preparing an obituary, Professor Raico kindly sent me a deeply moving passage from Adonais, Shelley’s great eulogy to Keats, that, as usual for Raico, struck just the right note in a final assessment of Mises:

For such as he can lend—they borrow not Glory from those who made the world their prey: And he is gathered to the kings of thought Who waged contention with their time’s decay, And of the past are all that cannot pass away.⁷⁰

⁶⁶ See, for example, Craver, “Emigration,” p. 5; and Mises, My Years, p. 222.

⁶⁷ Mises, My Years, p. 211.

⁶⁸ William E. Rappard, “On Reading von Mises,” in Mary Sennholz, ed., On Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), p. 17.

⁶⁹ Ralph Raico, “The Legacy of Ludwig von Mises,” The Libertarian Review (September 1981), p. 19. The article was included in a Mises Centennial Celebration issue of the magazine. An earlier version was published in The Alternative, February 1975.

⁷⁰ Raico, “Legacy,” p. 22.