Ludwig von Mises and Classical Liberalism

Abstract

In studying the development of western freedoms, perhaps no subject is more worthy of discussion than classical liberalism, which the late historian Ralph Raico wrote was “the signature political philosophy of Western Civilization.” Raico defined classical liberalism as “the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade.” This ideology arose in the Middle Ages, came alive in the 16th and 17th centuries, declined at the end of the 19th century, and was reborn in the 20th century largely at the hands of one remarkable man—the Austrian-born economist and historian Ludwig von Mises. Through a reasoned and investigated reconstruction of primary sources, this paper will catalog the ideas and achievements of Ludwig von Mises to demonstrate that he was the critical intellectual link in the continuation of the classical liberal tradition. This was the case in both a chronological sense (by connecting the ideas of 17th and 18th-century thinkers through its decline in the late 19th and early 20th century to later 20th-century classical liberals such as F.A. Hayek) and in a geographical sense (by transmitting the classical liberal ideas that had primarily been developed in Europe to the United States in the 20th century). Mises was responsible for the renaissance of classical liberalism in the United States and the birth of the modern-day libertarian movement. Mises’s life work was a full-throated defense of classical liberalism, to include free-market economics, private property, and anti-imperialism.