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Jörg Guido Hülsmann. Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute. 2007. Pp. xvi + 1143 (hb). ISBN 9781-933550-18-3. US$43.00.
Jörg Hülsmann's Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism is a biography of the life of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), one of the leaders of the Austrian School of economics. Apart from Murray Rothbard's entry on Mises in the The New Palgrave and his The Essential Von Mises (1973), the most important biography of Mises was written by his wife, Margit von Mises: My Years with Ludwig von Mises (1984). Mises also recorded his intellectual development through to 1 940 shortly after his arrival in the United States in Memoirs (2009), which was published as Notes and Recollections in 1978 by his wife. Other recent biographies include James Edwards (1985), Rothbard (1988), Israel Kirzner (2001) and Carsten Pallas (2005).
Hülsmann's biography is a welcome addition to these scholarly accounts of Mises's life and works. It is cast in a distinctive style and examines, with some skill, Mises's intellectual development in the context of the tumultuous events of Middle Europe from 1881 through to the 1930s and, following his move across the North Atlantic, the no less startling changes that took place in the United States from 1940 up until his death in 1973.
Hülsmann constructs his narrative by segmenting Mises's life into further stages, in which he establishes the way in which Mises's written work relates to the economic and political dimensions of each period. Indeed, each of Mises's scholarly works is assessed as a product of his social and intellectual development. This allows the author to intersperse Mises's social life within the setting of the political upheavals of Europe and Austria in particular. He uses this technique to reveal something of the motivations that moved Mises to write his many books and articles. It is a refreshing insight into Mises's scholarly life.
The need to dissect Mises's life in this way is particularly important since Mises was not given to writing much about himself or his personal affairs. This task was left to his wife, who prepared a biography after Mises's death. Even Mises's book, Memoirs, and his essay, 'My Contributions of Economic Theory' (written in 1940), reveal little of...