Ernest Solvay (1838 - 1922): Belgian inustrialist and philanthropist. A sickly child, Solvay did not attend university, instead taking a job at the family's chemical plant. He devised a process for manufacturing soda ash from limestone and seawater. He became wealthy from his patents on this process. He endowed a business school, a school for sociology, and a school for physics and chemistry at the Free University of Brussells. Mises mentions him as one of many social reformers who seek to solve the problem of scarcity by printing copious amounts of money.
Carl Menger (1840 - 1921): Austrian economist. Menger studied economics and law, then began a journalistic career in Vienna. In 1871 he published Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Principles of Economics) which is today generally recognized as the foundation of the Austrian School. In this book Menger advocated a new methodology for the science of economics. He also solved the classical paradox of value by introducing the notion of marginal utility (a concept also discovered by Léon Walras and by W.S. Jevons). During the 1880s Menger became deeply embroiled in the Methodenstreit, a dispute about the proper procedure of economic inquiry. Mises makes extensive references to Menger, identifying him as the founder of the Austrian School and as one of the men who resolved the classical paradox of value. Click here to read more about Carl Menger.
Alfred Espinas (1844 - 1922): French author and sociologist. Mises credits him as the first person to use the term praxeology, although Espinas apparently used it in a broader sense than Mises does: Espiinas contrasts technology, focused on efficiency, with praxeology, encompassing all the means at man's disposal.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900): German philosopher and social critic. Deeply religious in his youth, Nietzsche about 1873 decided that Christianity is bankrupt and that God is dead. Basing his philosophy on Schopenhauer's "will to power," he spoke out in favor of a new ethos based on the superman, who does whatever he wants to do simply because he has the power to do it. Nietzsche was a close associate of the noted composer Richard Wagner, but they broke irreconcilably in 1877 when Nietzche declared that the opera Parsifal incorporated Christian ideals. He went mad in 1888 and spent the rest of his life in the care of his sister, who would not leave him at the asylum in Weimar. Many of Nietzsche's ideas found favor with the Nazis, though Nietzsche himself was fiercely individualistic and generally opposed to socialism. Mises alludes to Nietzche as one of those effete philosophers who speak glowingly of the violence inherent in human nature, but who could not survive as long as a minute without the benefits provided by civil society and the division of labor.
Philip Henry Wicksteed (1844 - 1927): English theologian and economist. Wicksteed's father was a clergyman in Leeds, and his mother was part of a politically active family. Young Philip attended University College in London and also the Manchester New College. He received his degree in 1867, and embarked on a career as a Unitarian minister. Wicksteed left the pulpit in 1897 to become a medievalist and scholar. Inspired by Henry Georges's Progress and Poverty, he began to study economics from an ethical point of view. Wicksteed's book The Alphabet of Economic Science contains an example of the Mengerian theory of price formation that was unfortunately supplanted by the Walrasian theory of economic equilibrium. Mises cites another book, The Commonsense of Political Economy, while discussing the intransitivity of individual preference relationships.
John Bates Clark (1847 - 1938): American economist; contemporary of Menger and Böhm-Bawerk. His early study in Germany was influenced by the Historical School, and his later work reflected that influence -- he was concerned with society as an organism (as in post-Hegelian philosophy) and laid particular stress on the ethical implications of economic theory. His major work, The Distribution of Wealth (1899), used the concept of marginal utility to describe how the factors of production are allocated among various industries. Clark divided economics into three subjects: the individual acting man; the static economy in its entirety; and the dynamic economy. Mises speaks highly of the care with which Clark addressed the epistemological issues underlying economic science.
Georges Sorel (1847 - 1922): French historian and politiical theorist. The son of a businessman, Sorel had little formal education. He became an engineer in the Department of Public Works in 1869. After 25 years in the civil service he retired to Paris and began a second career as a political theorist. He openly embraced Marxism in 1893. Sorel eventually abandoned Marxism for syndicalism, which seeks to use trade unions as the vehicle through which the workers eventually seize the means of production and overthrow the capitalists. Mises mentions Sorel as one of many "reformers" who advocated violence in pursuit of political ends.
Vilfredo Pareto (1848 - 1923): Italian economist and sociologist. A graduate of the University of Turin, he was trained as a mathematician and physicist. During his early engineering career he wrote many magazine articles in which he applied mathematics to economic problems. These led to his appointment as the successor to Walras in the chair of political economy at Lausanne (1893), where he continued and sharpened his predecessor's mathematical analyses of economic problems. His later work dealt with the structure of society, with mobility within that structure, and with the identification of desirable social ends. Rightly or wrongly, his name has been associated with fascism. Mises mentions his failure adequately to comprehend the inevitable failure of economic calculation in a socialist milieu, and the stupendous number of simultaneous equations that must be solved to give expression to Pareto's theory of equilibrium.
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851 - 1914): Austrian economist; student of Menger who advanced a theory of interest based on time preferences and the roundabout nature of more efficient processes of production. In Positive Theorie der Kapitalzinses (1889; English translation The Positive Theory of Capital 1923) he explained why lenders demand interest and how borrowers find the means to pay it. He also argued that interest is a natural phenomenon which socialism can never abolish. Mises makes many references to Böhm-Bawerk as one of the most influential early members of the Austrian School; his theory of interest, while substantially correct, was not rooted deeply enough in the category of action.
Friedrich von Wieser (1851 - 1926): Austrian economist; student of Menger and contemporary of Böhm-Bawerk. His major contribution to economic thought concerns the subjective theory of value and explains how the forces of competition combine with marginal utility and acts of individual choice to distribute the available means of production into the various product lines in which they can most profitably be employed. In other words, Wieser made more explicit the mode in which Adam Smith's "invisible hand" actually operates. Mises criticizes von Wieser for failing to recognize that values are subjective and for arguing, along with Fisher, that values can be measured.
Karl Kautsky (1854 - 1938): Czech philosopher, journalist, and "scientific" Marxist. Kautsky was born in Prague. In 1861 his parents moved to Vienna, where young Karl was educated. He studied at the university, but never received a degree. At the age of 21 he joined the Social Democratic Party, and devoted the rest of his life promoting socialism. He traveled widely, visiting London, Berlin, Georgia, and Amsterdam, where he ded. Although Kautsky was a Marxist, he was very critical of the Russian Bolsheviks, whom he regarded as slave drivers. "In the terrible conditions created by the Piatiletka (Five-Year Plans), people rapidly perished. Soviet films, of course, did not show this." Mises cites his book Die soziale Revolution (The Socialist Revolution): Kautsky claims that the proletarian regime will transform labor from a pain into a pleasure.
Henri Poincaré (1854 - 1912): French physicist, mathematician, and philosopher of science. A natural mathematical genius with an unusual facility for mental calculation, Henri earned his doctorate in 1879 and two years later obtained a professorship at the University of Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life. His contributions to mathematics were many and varied, ranging from the theory of automorphic functions to the classical "3-body problem" of Newtonian mechanics to the topology of relativistic space and time and even to the theory of numbers (quadratic forms). In La Science et l'hypothesé (1903; English translation Science and Hypothesis, 1905) he developed the epistemological notion of conventionalism. In this view of science, scientists do not talk about the real world that actually exists. Instead, they talk only about symbols they have decided, by convention, to regard as if they were the real thing. Mises criticizes this notion, and similar ideas advanced by Albert Einstein, as being inappropriate in the realm of praxeology. When it comes to thinking and human action, he says, we are the real thing, and there's no sense in pretending otherwise.
Charles Seignobos (1854 - 1942): Frwnch historian. He obtained his bachelor's degree in 1871. After some years abroad, he obtained his PhD in history in 1881, and soon was appointed to a position at the Sorbonne. Besides writing about actual historical events, Seignobos is recognized as expert in the historical method. Mises mentions him in conmnection with the notion that the historian's understanding must be tempered by and consistent with other branches of knowledge, such as physics, and chemistry.
Eugen von Bergmann (1857 - 1919): German economist. Born in Odessa, Russia, he attended the University of Tübingen and received his doctorate in political economy in 1883. He taught for a few years in Russia, returned to Tübingen in 1889, and eventually moved to the Baltic Technical University in Riga. Mises refers to him as a member of the German Historical School.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857 - 1939): French philosopher and anthropologist. Professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1899 through 1927, Lévy-Bruhl wrote several books about the mental processes of primitive human beings, including La mentalité primitive (1922; Eng. Primitive Mentality, 1923) and Les fonctiones mentales dans les sociétés primitives (1910; Eng. How Natives Think, 1926 -- more literally, Mental Functions in Primitive Societies). Although Lévy-Bruhl argued that primitive mental processes are fundamentally different from the "developed" logic of the educated European mind, Mises counters, convincingly, that there is no categorial distinction between the "prelogical and mystic" thoughts of primitive tribesmen and the "prelogical and mystic" thought that pervades medieval scholasticism. In other words, Mises contends that the categorial structure of human thought and action is everywhere and at all times the same.
Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941): French author and philosopher. Born in Paris, his early years were spent as a teacher in the French secondary school system. He was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the Collège de France in 1900. From 1921 to 1926 he served as the president of the "Commission for Intellectual Cooperation" at the League of Nations, and in 1927 he received the Nobel prize for literature. His philosophy stresses the nature of time, and how the world is in constant flux. Some of his ideas resemble the much earlier philosophy of Heraclitus. Mises quotes Bergson in reference to man's consciousness of time, and also to illustrate how widespread some economic fallacies are.
Émile Meyerson (1859 - 1933): French philosopher of science. Born in Lublin, Poland and educated at Heidelberg, Meyerson settled in Paris in 1882. He became a naturalized French citizen after WW I. He wrote several books about the philosophy of science, and he was an early Zionist. Mises quotes Meyerson: ""l'acte par lequel nous ramenons l'identique ce qui nous a, tout d'abord, paru n'stre pas tel." (Science is "the act by which we recognize as identical two phenomena which at first appeared to be different.")
Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert (1859 - 1941): German Kaiser and King of Prussia. William was a breech baby. His left arm, and his brain, were injured during the delivery. He was a bellicose leader who alienated many of Germany's former allies. He abdicated his thrones after Germany lost WW I. Mises mentions him in connection with the historians' ideal types.
Edmund Husserl (1861 - 1947): Born in Prossnitz, Austria, Husserl eventually moved to Leipzig, where he studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy. He continued to study mathematics in Berlin (under Kronecker and Weierstrass), finally completing his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Vienna in 1883. He soon turned his attention to philosophy; in 1887 he became a privatdozent at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. In 1891 he published Philosophie der Arithmetik. Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen (Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations), which analyzed the concept of number. In 1912 he established a journal (Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung, or Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), which published articles about phenomonology foe nearly 20 years. Mises cites that journal while discussing the temporal asects of praxeology.
Edward Potts Cheyney (1861 - 1947): American historian from Pennsylvania. Graduated from the Unoversity of Pennsylvania in 1883, and from the Wharton School a year later. He worked for some time as an instructor at U. Penn, and became a full professor in 1897. He was active in the American Historical Society, where he championed the concept of "scientific history": the historian should be a dispssionate reporter of known historical facts. His ouevre concentrated first on the history of England, and later on medieval Europe.
Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (1864 - 1920): German sociologist, historian, and political economist. Weber's father was a lawyer and civil servant who enjoyed the company of intellectuals; as a boy, Max overheard many lively discussions about politucs and statecraft. Weber was an inattentive student who loved to read. He took an early interest in history. In 1882 he enrolled in the law school at the University of Heidelberg, passing the bar just four years later. He earned his PhD in law in 1889. He joined the faculty of the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin a few years later. In 1883 he married Marianne Schnitzer, an author and feminist. In 1897, following a violent quarrel with his father, Weber had a nervous breadown. He took a leave of absence from his professorial duties, and spent several years traveling through Southern Europe, in an effort to regain his health. In 1904 he became associate editor of a scholorly journal, Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. (Social Science and Social Policy), which soon published Weber's most famous contribution to sociology: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). In a series of essays, Weber argued that the Protestant insistence on good works led to the rise of capitalism in Northern Europe. The essays were eventually collected into a book, which is yet today the subject of lively debate. Mises cites Weber two times: as an example of abstract quasi-historical studies detailing how various societal structures arose; and as a very astute observer who noticed how important ends and means are in the study of economics, despite his lack of formal economic training.
Eugene Dietzgen (1862 - 1929): German philosopher and industrialist. Dietzgen's father, Joseph Dietzgen, was a Marxist who invented his own unique version of dialectical materialism. Dietzgen's father sent Eugene to America in 1881, to prevent his son's conscription into the military. Eugene moved to Chicago, where he founded the Eugene Dietzgen Drafting Company, which is still doing business today. Eugene was a committed Marxist, and he wrote several essays extolling the virtues of Marxism. Mises cites his Briefe iiber Logik, speziell demokratisch-proletarische Logik (Letters on Logic, Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic) as an example of Marxian polyogism.
Charles-Vincent Langlois (1863 - 1929): French historian and paleographer (that is, an expert on ancient writing). Widely regarded as one of the leading scholars in 19th century France, Langlois taught paleography, bibliography, and medieval history at the University of Paris. French history was his specialty. He wrote several books, including texts on historical and bibliographical methods. Mises cites him as an authority on the proper conduct of historical inquiries: The historian must examine all the available evidence of historical events with the best and most current technological tools, then bring his understanding to bear on all the data.
Framz Oppenheimer (1864 - 1943): German sociologist, medical doctor, and democratic socialist. Oppenheimer was educated first as a doctor, and practiced medicine from 1886 to 1895. About 1890 his attention began to shift toward politics; he became editor-in-chief of Welt am Morgen (The World this Morning). In 1909 he earned a degree in economics. In 1919 he accepted an appointment as head of the sociology department at Goethe University in Frankfurt. His tenure there was fruitful: the so-called "Frankfurt School" of sociology blossomed under his tutelage. By 1938 most of his department had decamped for safer positons in America, most of them landing at Columbia University in New York. Oppenheimer took a different route, through Asia to Los Angeles. Mises quotes him while discussing polylogism: Oppenheimer asserted that although individuals make errors in judgment, entire classes of mankind are, in effect, infallible.
Irving Fisher (1867 - 1947): American mathematical economist. Spent his entire academic career (1884 - 1935) at Yale University. Fisher devised a quantitative theory to explain the relationship between prices and the quantity of money, which he set forth in The Purchasing Power of Money (1911). A great fan of index numbers and economic statistics, he spent 25 years crusading for the "compensated dollar", to be constructed with reference to a standard market basket of goods. Mises criticizes this idea because it fails to recognize a basic truth: values are subjective.
Tsar Nickolas II (1868 - 1918): Last Tsar of Russia. Nicholas lived a life of leisure , traveling widely, until his father's unexpected death in 1894 catapulted him into the role of Tsar. He was not really prepared for the job. His attempts to modernize Russia and strengthen an alliance with France were largely unsuccessful. His intansigence during the Russo-Japanese War, which led to a humiliating defeat in 1905, and his ineffectual leadership during WW I undermined his popularity and his auhority. He abdicated the throne in 1917, and was brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Mises mentions him as an example of Marxism's many victims. The Marxist knows that the force of history is on his side, and is willing, even eager, to use violence and murder to advance the Party's cause.
Vladimir Illyich Lenin (1870 - 1924): Russian revolutionary and lawyer. Born V.I. Ulyanov, he became a Marxist about 1889, and organized his first revolutionary committee in 1894. Exiled from Russia in 1907, he spent ten years in Germany, orchestrating the Bolshevik movement from afar. Returning to Russia in 1917, he led the Bolshevik overthrow of the provisional democratic government and instituted the "dictatorship of the proletariat" prescribed by Marx. He was totally dedicated to Marxism and orchestrated thousands of killings without compunction. Mises mentions his name as an example of an immoral, unethical Marxist. To read more about Lenin, click here.
William McDougall (1871 - 1938): English psychologist. Educated at Cambridge, McDougall served for a few years on the faculty at University College, London (Bentham's institution) before obtaining a post at Oxford. His textbook An Introduction to Social Psychology (1908) ran through many editions and was a standard university text for more than 50 years. Although he was a careful student of the physiological basis of psychology, McDougall opposed the doctrines of materialism and behaviorism. His stance rendered him unpopular within his peer group. He moved to Harvard University in 1920, and moved again (to Duke, in Durham, NC) in 1927. McDougall was a dualist, and preached the reality of mind, and mentalism, throughout his career. Mises quotes him in support of the Austrian technique of methodological dualism.