[See also The Meaning of the Mises Papers; and The Story of the Lost Papers]
By Hans-Hermann Hoppe
[The Wall Street Journal, A16, Thursday, January 30, 1997]
Among the tragic intellectual losses of our war-torn century were thought to be the papers of an entire generation of Austrian scholars who were forced to flee the Nazis with only the clothes on their backs. But that loss is now being rectified. Many of those papers were tucked away in a state archive in Moscow; in the next two years, they will be published in the West on CD-ROM.
Among those victimized was Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), among the most important classical liberals and economists of the century. As the leader of the Austrian School, he was the first economist to write a full-scale refutation of socialist economics, predicting in 1921 the precise nature of its failure.
"On the night the Nazis came to Vienna," Mises's late wife, Margit, wrote in her memoir, they took "his valuable library, his writings, his documents and everything they found of importance, packed it all into 38 cases, and drove away."
Arriving in the U.S. in August 1940, Mises quickly became our country's leading advocate of the free market. His 1949 book, "Human Action," remains a definitive work, still giving rise to leftist invective against "dead Austrian economists."
Without Mises's Vienna papers, there would always have been a void in our understanding of his life and thought, and that of his students, like Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek. But as it turned out, the Nazis retained the papers, which were captured by the Soviets at the end of the war.
Until last May their fate was generally unknown. That was when the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research into the Consequences of War published an astounding book, "Confiscated Austrian Documents: Austrian Findings in the Russian Special Archive." The authors, Gerhard Jagschitz and Stefan Karner had discovered that Mises's papers were held by Moscow's Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections.
The 1,650-foot-long Austrian section of the Russian Special Archive includes the papers of numerous organizations, clubs, political groups and government agencies, as well as of scholars like Mises. The Mises papers comprise nearly 20,000 items dating from 1900 to 1938, all reportedly in perfect condition.
What a treasure they are. Profs. Jagschitz and Karner carefully documented the collection, including Mises's correspondence with colleagues, publishers, journalists and students. The records of his dealings with everything from the Rotary Club to the League of Nations are here. Included also are papers on Mises's own education and military service during World War I, information on those he served as an academic adviser and a wide variety of Mises's published writings.
Economists will be particularly excited about the notes to his lectures and seminars, which may unlock crucial insights into the history of economic thought before the rise of Keynesianism. Before and after Hitler invaded Austria, the Austrian Chamber of Commerce was a target of attacks from left and right for its firm defense of economic liberty. Mises was its chief economist. Included in the archive, then, are the extensive minutes of the meetings of the chamber and other organizations that served as forums for political and intellectual resistance to totalitarianism.
The Mises papers, brought to American attention by Richard Ebeling of Hillsdale College, may all be available in the West within two years. (Hillsdale will put some of the papers on display in March.) The Russian Special Archive has agreed to make all the material in its Austrian section available on microfilm or CD-ROM, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute is working to ensure that the Mises papers will be among the first to be published in this format.
Consider the mind-boggling irony. The century's leading intellectual opponent of socialism, run out of his country by national socialists, has his papers stolen by both Nazis and Communists. Yet the papers themselves are treated with tender loving care and preserved for future generations to understand the evils against which this great scholar fought. It is yet another gift the collapse of socialism has given to lovers of freedom the world over.
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Mr. Hoppe, a professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is co-editor of The Review of Austrian Economics and a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute at Auburn University.
(See related letter: "Letters to the Editor: How Mises's Papers Were Tracked Down" -- WSJ Feb. 11, 1997)