Friedrich August von Hayek, Interventionism

Hayek’s introduction to the 1976 reissue of Ludwig von Mises’s Critique of Interventionism, presented here in its 2013 English version, situates that book within Mises’s intellectual development and the conflicts of German-speaking economics. Its organizing claim is that Mises’s controversial criticism of interventionism deserves retrospective recognition as an intellectual service. Hayek establishes this through a compressed biography: the emergence of Mises’s classical liberalism, his opposition to the dominant academic schools, his political prescience, and his subsequent methodological work and exile. The accompanying editorial notes supply bibliographical and biographical context; the first identifies W. W. Bartley, III as the translator.

The introduction begins by locating interventionism after Mises’s major contributions to monetary theory and the analysis of socialism:

After the two great works with which Ludwig von Mises established his position as a leading thinker in the field of economic theory, The Theory of Money and Credit and Socialism, he concerned himself for a number of years predominantly with the problems of those intermediate forms between a pure market economy and a socialist order which were apparently in the process of being formed.

“Intermediate forms” names the practical and intellectual problem that connects the reissued essays. Hayek presents interventionism as a contemporary development requiring critical examination, rather than simply an abstract alternative to capitalism or socialism. Mises encountered it continually as financial consultant and chief scientific advisor to the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, while university teaching occupied only a small part of his time. His criticism thus arose at the intersection of economic theory, policy advice, and confrontation with the sociological-historical school of German economics. Hayek does not reconstruct the economic mechanisms discussed in the essays; he explains the circumstances that made their critique necessary.

The account of Mises’s academic relationships sharpens this picture of intellectual independence. Hayek singles out Max Weber as a genuine friend and names a small group of economists whom Mises respected for resisting prevailing views. Yet esteem did not necessarily imply intellectual indebtedness: Hayek says Mises could learn little from these contemporaries, while valuing neglected figures of an earlier generation. The distinction separates personal association, professional courage, and theoretical influence. It also explains how Mises could remain engaged with German-speaking economics while becoming increasingly critical of its dominant institutions and doctrines.

Hayek makes this opposition more significant by tracing Mises’s own beginnings to aspirations associated with Sozialpolitik and the Fabians. Classical liberalism appears as the outcome of an intellectual conversion, chiefly in Böhm-Bawerk’s seminar, rather than as an inherited position. The sequence of publications then charts the consolidation of that change:

His position finds its first great development in 1922, in his Socialism.

Hayek finds earlier expressions of the position in The Theory of Money and Credit and a fuller development in Nation, State and Economy in 1919, whose reception suffered from the circumstances of its publication. His judgment is discriminating rather than uniformly celebratory: he regards the short, hastily written Liberalism as less successful. These distinctions place the interventionism essays within an evolving body of work, while showing that Hayek’s admiration does not erase differences in achievement or reception.

The discussion of Critique of Interventionism turns directly to controversy. Mises’s attacks on Sombart, Schmoller, Brentano, and Herkner caused offence, but Hayek retrospectively calls their sharpness a great service. The introduction thereby asks readers to reconsider professional hostility as something other than evidence against the criticism. A publishing anecdote adds a concrete qualification to the original book’s composition: Mises intended to include his essay on the nationalization of credit, but a journal editor misplaced its sole handwritten manuscript until inclusion was no longer possible. The editorial notes explain that the essay was included in the edition introduced by Hayek. The anecdote distinguishes an accidental omission from a deliberate limitation of scope.

Hayek then extends his vindication from economic controversy to political judgment:

Mises ranks not only as an extremely sharp critic, but rather also as a pessimist who was, unfortunately, all too often right.

The supporting recollection concerns a September 1932 meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik at Bad Kissingen. Mises warned colleagues that they were gathering for the last time and predicted Hitler’s accession to power within twelve months. Their astonishment and laughter exposed both disbelief in that forecast and failure to understand its consequences for their association. Hayek recalls that it did not meet again until after the war. The episode gives personal testimony to the claim of prescience, without supplying a theoretical demonstration of the economic arguments.

The closing movement follows Mises from Vienna to Geneva and then to the United States. His increasing attention to the philosophical and methodological foundations of social science culminates in the 1933 essays on economic theory and the 1940 Nationalökonomie, later revised as Human Action. Hayek stresses that full-time scientific work became possible only in Geneva in 1934, when Mises was fifty-three. War and displacement restricted the German book’s reception, while New York enabled more than thirty years of fruitful research and teaching. The introduction’s relevance lies in this connection between intellectual production and its conditions of reception: it frames the reissue as an opportunity to reassess arguments once obscured by academic antagonism, publishing accidents, and political catastrophe.