Preliminary Remarks on Mises in Interwar Vienna

The professional class of which Ludwig von Mises (and to some extent also his friend Kelsen) was a member was not only fond of thinking of itself as the defender of their highly cultured environment. This large group of intellectuals, administrators, aristocrats, and politicians had also been raised to belief that they are the intellectual safeguard of a large multinational empire of well over 50 million people. The incredibly diverse ethnic composition of the Habsburg Empire gave it the appearance of an unique international and cosmopolitan order. The unexpected situation in which the fatefully reduced little Austria found itself as a result of the catastrophic war raised a new set of unprecedented problems which most scholars who had routinely come to assume that their primary tasks were attached to a huge multi-national Empire found difficult to turn their attention to. Their society had disappeared. While the final collapse of the old Habsburg Empire had become a fairly general expectation by late 1917, virtually no one had expected the state of affairs which was actually about to emerge. By 1918 the section of the Austrian population which considered itself heir to the ideals of European \93liberalism\94 had been reduced to a position of political powerlessness. Mises found it especially difficult to turn his attention to the smaller problems and as he gradually became detached from the ethos of old Austria, his life and thought began almost reflexively to revolve around a social order which was characterized by the rule of law and peaceful cooperation, but which did not yet exist. Following old Austrian liberal tradition, von Wieser was the first to emphasize that an intimate connection existed between the conceptual foundations of legal and political theory on the one hand, and those of economic theory on the other.