Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (September 29, 1881 – October 10, 1973) was an Austrian-born economist, philosopher, and classical liberal theorist who led the Austrian School of economics in the twentieth century.

Educated at the University of Vienna, where he earned a doctorate in law and economics, Mises developed the methodology of praxeology—the logical deduction from the axiom of human action—as the basis for economic science, distinguishing it from empirical positivism prevalent in mainstream economics. In his early work The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), he integrated marginal utility theory with the quantity theory of money to explain the origins of business cycles through credit expansion and malinvestment by central banks.

Ludwig Heinrich von Mises was born on September 29, 1881, in Lemberg (present-day Lviv, Ukraine), then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Arthur Edler von Mises, served as a construction engineer for the Austrian state railways, while his mother, Adele (née Landau), came from established Viennese Jewish families; the Mises lineage had received hereditary nobility in 1881 from Emperor Franz Joseph I for contributions to the steel industry. The family was secular and assimilated into the German-speaking liberal elite of the empire, with Mises's younger brother, Richard (born 1883), later achieving prominence as a mathematician and aerodynamicist.