My Years with Ludwig von Mises.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

war and his being called up for active service. After some years in the
artillery, I believe in the end commanding a battery, he found himself at
the conclusion of the war in the economics section of the War Ministry,
where he evidently was again thinking actively on wider economic problems.
At any rate, almost as soon as the war was over he was ready with a
new book, a little known and now rare work called Nation, Staat und
Wirtschaft of which I particularly treasure my copy because it contains so
many germs of later developments.
I suppose the idea of his second magnum opus must already have been
forming in his mind at the time since the crucial chapter of it appeared
less than two years later as a famous article on the problem of economic
calculation in a socialist community. Professor Mises had then returned
to his position as legal adviser and financial expert of the Vienna Chamber
of Commerce. Chambers of Commerce, I should explain, are in Austria
official institutions whose main task is to advise the government on
legislation. At the same time Professor Mises was combining this position
with that of one of the heads of a special government office connected
with carrying out certain clauses of the peace treaty. It was in that capacity
that I first came to know him well. I had, of course, been a member of
his class at the university. But since, as I must mention in my own excuse,
I was rushing through an abridged postwar course in law and did not
spend all my spare time on economics, I have not profited from that
opportunity as much as I might have. But then it so happened that my
first job was as Professor Mises' subordinate in that temporary government
office; there I came to know him mainly as a tremendously efficient
executive, the kind of man who, as was said of Johri Stuart Mill, because
he does a normal day's work in two hours, has always a clear desk and
time to talk about anything. I came to know him as one of the best
educated and informed men I had ever known and, what was most important
at the time of great inflation, as the only man who really understood
what was happening. There was a time then when we thought he would
soon be called to take charge of the finances of the country. He was so
clearly the only man capable of stopping inflation, and much damage
might have been prevented if he had been put in charge. It was not to be.
Of what I had not the least idea at that time, however, in spite of daily
contacts, was that Professor Mises was also writing the book which
would make the most profound impression on my generation. Die Gemeinwirtschaft,
later translated as Socialism, appeared in 1922. Much as
we had come to admire Mises' achievements in economic theory, this was
something of much broader scope and significance. It was a work on
political economy in the tradition of the great moral philosophers, a Montesquieu
or Adam Smith, containing both acute knowledge and profound
wisdom. I have little doubt that it will retain the position it has achieved
in the history of political ideas. But there can be no doubt whatever about
the effect on us who have been in our most impressible age. To none of us
young men who read the book when it appeared was the world ever the
same again. If Roepke stood here, or Robbins, or Ohlin (to mention only
those of exactly the same age as myself), they would tell you the same
story. Not that we at once sw'allowed it all. For that it was much too
189