Planned Chaos
A concise attack on fascism and socialism, by the master economist of the 20th century.
Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian school of economics throughout most of the 20th century.
He was also a prodigious originator in economic theory and a prolific author.
Mises earned his doctorate in law and economics from the University of Vienna in 1906. In 1926, Mises founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. From 1909 to 1934, he was an economist for the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. Before the Anschluss in 1934, Mises left for Geneva, where he was a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies until 1940, when he emigrated to New York City. From 1948 to 1969, he was a visiting professor at New York University.
Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation.
Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that Mises called “praxeology.”