Von Mises: Our Cover Subject Reviewed

This file is a 1965 American Opinion cover-review and bibliographic profile of Ludwig von Mises by Hans Sennholz. Its scope is a guided survey of Mises’s major works, with Sennholz’s interpretation supported by the voices of Rose Wilder Lane, Henry Hazlitt, F. A. Hayek, Percy L. Greaves, and repeated passages from Mises himself. The structure moves book by book—from Human Action, Socialism, and The Theory of Money and Credit through Theory and History, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, Planning for Freedom, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, and The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth—to present Mises as both systematic economist and civilizational critic.

Sennholz’s central thesis is that Mises’s economics cannot be separated from his defense of liberty. He introduces him not merely as a technical economist but as a rallying figure for anti-socialist thought in the twentieth century:

Since the beginning of this century Professor Ludwig von Mises has published a great many original and learned writings that have made him one of the most renowned living economists.

The opening frames Human Action as Mises’s decisive intellectual achievement. Lane’s comparison to Marx gives the review its dramatic scale: Mises is cast as the anti-Marx, a theorist whose ideas may redirect history away from collectivism.

I rank Human Action with Rousseau's Contract Social, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Marx's Das Kapital, Darwin's Origin of Species, as a force in human life.

From there Sennholz turns to Socialism, treating it as the work that exposed the impossibility of rational planning without market prices. The conceptual center is economic calculation: prices generated by private exchange are not incidental but the very means by which society compares costs, allocates resources, and judges profit or loss.

Without the common denominator for economic calculation, which is the market price, a socialist society cannot rationally allocate its labor, capital, land and other resources, and fairly distribute the yields of production.

The review then places The Theory of Money and Credit within Mises’s lifelong critique of inflation and monetary nationalism. Sennholz presents sound money as a constitutional restraint on political power, especially through the gold standard and the removal of governmental discretion over money. The American monetary problem, in this telling, is not technical mismanagement but the consequence of statist ideology.

In the middle sections, Sennholz broadens the argument from economics to history, psychology, and epistemology. Theory and History is used to stress that freedom disappears when an authority assigns every person’s role. The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality explains anti-capitalism as resentment redirected into ideology. Planning for Freedom then condenses the political point: economic and political liberty stand or fall together.

Political freedom is the corollary of economic freedom.

The same section clarifies Mises’s rejection of the false opposition between planning and chaos. The issue is who plans: individuals in markets or the state over individuals.

The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is: whose planning?

Sennholz’s account of The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science emphasizes Mises’s anti-positivist epistemology. Economics begins from the fact of purposeful action, not from methods borrowed uncritically from the natural sciences. This is one of the review’s core conceptual moves: to connect the defense of markets with a theory of knowledge adequate to human agency.

There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and to describe. There is human action.

The final movement returns to liberalism in its older meaning. In The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth, Mises’s liberalism is private property, peace, free trade, equality before law, and representative government. Sennholz contrasts this with twentieth-century “pseudoliberalism,” which he sees as planning, confiscation, and administrative power. The warning is civilizational rather than merely partisan:

Pseudoliberalism is heading toward a general collapse of civilization.

The piece’s relevance lies in its compact presentation of the Austrian-liberal canon at a Cold War moment when Sennholz believed Western societies were abandoning the institutions that had produced freedom and prosperity. Its governing structure is cumulative: each reviewed book adds a layer to the same thesis—calculation against socialism, sound money against inflation, action against positivism, private property against planning, and liberalism against administrative omnipotence.