THAT LUDWIG VON MISES was one of the greatest economists of the 20th century should never be doubted. Mises never worked in scientific or popular obscurity despite various mythologies on left and right that are told. Prior to World War I, Mises had established himself as a leading economic theorist among the younger generation in German-language economics, and in fact in Continental Europe more widely, with The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), and during the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, Mises’s reputation as a theorist and methodologist spread internationally. Leading economic thinkers in England (such as Lionel Robbins) and in the United States (such as Frank Knight) came to study closely Mises’s contributions to economic science, and engage his ideas critically. During this time, Mises’s reputation as an outstanding teacher and mentor of young economists grew as the success of his students, such as F.A. Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, Gottfried Habeler, Felix Kaufman, and Alfred Schutz, spread out from the German-language scientific community throughout Europe and eventually to the international scientific community. In fact, as Henry Simons once remarked, if judged by the contributions of one’s students, Mises must be considered the greatest economic teacher of the first half of the 20th century.¹
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