The Currency and Finances of the Federal State of Austria
26. The Economic Crisis and Lessons for Banking Policy
Part 4. Interventionism, Collectivism, and Their Ideological Roots
27. The Economic System of Interventionism
28. Economic Order and the Political System
29. Remarks Concerning the Ideological Roots of the Monetary Catastrophe of 1923
Appendixes
B. Short Curriculum Vitae of Mayer Rachmiel Mises of Lemberg
This volume, like the other two in this series, was made possible by the continuing support of Hillsdale College, which arranged for the translations of virtually all the articles, essays, and lectures contained in the volume. I would like to particularly thank Dr. Larry Arnn, Hillsdale College president, and Mr. Mike Harner, chief staff officer and assistant to the president at Hillsdale College. I am especially grateful for their patience and encouragement in my bringing the Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises project to a close with the publication of this, the last of the three volumes in the series.
The primary translators of the articles in this volume were the late Dr. Herbert Izzo and Dr. Rebecca Garber, with individual pieces translated by Wolfgang Grassl, Mary M. Custer, and Andrew Swift. To all of them I extend my most sincere thanks for making my work as editor that much easier. Dr. Izzo, an expert in both Romance and Germanic languages, had helped in the translation of many of the pieces that also appeared in volume 2 of these Selected Works. He was also a valued friend who deeply believed in the ideas of liberty, and whom I greatly miss.
The project would have never begun if former Hillsdale College president Dr. George Roche (1935-2006) had not immediately thrown the complete support of the college behind the work after my wife, Anna, and I discovered in 1996 that Mises’s “lost papers” that had been looted by the Nazis from his Vienna apartment in 1938 had survived the war, and were preserved in a former secret Soviet archive in Moscow, Russia. He and Mr. John Cervini, Hillsdale College director for development, promptly arranged the financial support for Anna and me to travel to Moscow in October 1996 to obtain photocopies of virtually the entire collection of 10,000 pages of material.
I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to Liberty Fund of Indianapolis for enthusiastically expressing an interest in publishing a large selection of these recovered documents and other related papers and essays in the three-volume set that is now, finally, in print. I particularly wish to thank Alan Russell and Chris Talley, who are senior officers at Liberty Fund, and Manuel Ayau, Leonard Liggio, and Giancarlo Ibarguen, who serve on Liberty Fund’s board of directors, all of whom I have known for many years, and whose friendship and support I greatly appreciate. I also owe a sincere thanks to Mr. Dan Kirklin of Liberty Fund, who has very helpfully assisted in the final editing process for this volume.
I would be remiss if I did not also mention Ludwig von Mises’s widow, Margit (1890-1993), who took me under her wing when I was a graduate student in New York many years ago, sharing her knowledge about her husband and the old Vienna before the Second World War, as well as encouraging my interest in her husband’s work. Margit kindly introduced me to her daughter, Gitta Sereny, who shared her knowledge and memories of her stepfather, Ludwig von Mises. Gitta and her husband, Donald Honeyman, graciously gave of their time during several trips that Anna and I made to London, where they live.
I also owe thanks to Bettina Bien Greaves, who for many years worked at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Irvington, New York. Already when I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, Bettina was sharing with me hard-to-get articles by Mises, and was the first one who told me about how the Nazis had plundered Mises’s apartment in Vienna and had taken away his papers, manuscripts, and other personal and family documents, many of which have now seen the light of day in these Selected Writings.
As I have said in acknowledgments in the previous volumes in this series, my greatest debt is to my wife, Anna. It was through her friends and contacts in her native city of Moscow that we were able to gain entrée to that former secret archive and acquire copies of the “lost papers.” She first organized the papers in a logical and systematic way when we returned to Hillsdale College, and has assisted me in every step of the process leading to their publication. She was especially helpful in the preparation of this volume in doing much of the research for the editor’s footnotes that are included in the chapters.
But most important, she has never wavered in her support and insistence that I bring the project to a successful conclusion. Her love and companionship have made everything that I do meaningful and worthwhile.
This three-volume set of the Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises has been published in reverse chronological order. The current volume, the last prepared in the series, in fact, is devoted to some of the earliest of Mises’s writings on a variety of economic issues. They mostly cover monetary, fiscal, and general economic policy matters in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before and during the First World War, with additional articles that Mises wrote in the postwar period that had not been included in volume 2. An appendix to the present volume includes a talk that Mises delivered at his private seminar, which would meet in his office at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, in the spring of 1934 on the methodology of the social sciences, before he moved to Geneva, Switzerland; and the curriculum vitae that his great-grandfather prepared for the Habsburg Emperor in 1881 as part of his ennoblement that gave him and his heirs the hereditary title of “Edler von.”
It is in the second volume of the Selected Writings (2002), Between the Two World Wars: Monetary Disorder, Interventionism, Socialism, and the Great Depression, that the reader will find a large collection of Mises’s many articles and policy pieces from the 1920s and 1930s dealing with the Great Austrian Inflation, fiscal and regulatory mismanagement by the government, and the negative effects of numerous forms of government intervention and controls before and during the Great Depression. The volume also includes critiques of socialist central planning and his defense of praxeology, the science of human action.
The third volume of the Selected Writings (2000), The Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction, focuses on Mises’s writings mostly from the first half of the 1940s. In the midst of the Second World War, Mises lectured and wrote on the pressing issues of how Europe, small nations, and underdeveloped countries could recover from war and poverty and start on the path to economic renewal and prosperity.
Each volume begins with an introduction in which I try to explain the historical context in which Mises wrote the pieces in that particular volume. I have also tried to assist the reader with footnotes explaining some of the ideas, persons, events, or geographical locations to which Mises refers in the text.
This project developed out of the discovery of the “lost papers” of Ludwig von Mises in a formerly secret KGB archive in