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A ROUND UNIVERSE 141
the postwar era, however, conservatism was rapidly growing in size and
strength, and Rand was no longer the sole intellectual of the crowd.
One of the fi rst libertarians Rand reached out to was Ludwig von
Mises, whom she had met briefl y during one of her trips east. While
other academics interested in the free market had found a welcoming
home at the University of Chicago, Mises was so far outside the economics
mainstream that no respected academic department would
hire him. Ultimately the Volker Fund was able to secure him a visiting
professorship at NYU, where they paid his salary (as they did for
Hayek at Chicago). Mises’s strongest connections were not to academia
but to Leonard Read’s Foundation for Economic Education, where he
gave regular lectures and was considered an employee. 21 As his affi liation
with FEE reminded her, Rand and Mises differed on important
points, primarily concerning morality. Whereas outsiders saw Mises
as a pro-capitalist hack, Mises fi rmly believed his economic theories
were strict science, utterly divorced from his political preferences and
beliefs. Misean economics pointedly did not concern itself with morality,
to Rand a dangerous failing. Still, she remained hopeful that Mises
and others could be converted to her point of view. She predicted, “it
would only be a case of showing to them that I had the most consistent
arguments.” 22
Rand’s personal relationship with Mises was predictably rocky. Both
were hot-tempered and principled, and tales about their confl icts were
legendary in conservative circles. Russell Kirk liked to regale his audiences
with a story about Mises taunting Rand as “a silly little Jew girl.” 23
The truth as both Rand and Mises remembered it was more prosaic. At
a dinner party with the Hazlitts, Rand began, as usual, trying to convert
Mises to her moral position. Henry Hazlitt and Mises both assumed a
utilitarian stance, arguing for capitalism on the basis of its benefi t to
society. Rand was testing out some of her ideas from Atlas Shrugged,
talking about how man survived only due to his mind and defi ning the
free use of rationality as a moral issue. According to Rand, Mises lost
his patience and “literally screamed, because he was trying to prove that
what I was saying was the same thing as Rousseau or natural rights,
and I was proving to him that it wasn’t.” The dinner ended on a tense
note, but Mises’s wife later arranged a reconciliation. Rand was not
unduly troubled by the incident, for Mises simply struck her as closed
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