Ernst Cassirer (1874 - 1945): Silesian neo-Kantian philosopher. Educated at Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Marburg, he was appointed professor of philosophy at Hamburg University in 1919. Cassirer was Jewish and, when Hitler came to power, he resigned his post and emigrated -- first to England, then to Sweden, and finally (1941) to the United States, where he taught at Yale and at Columbia. His major philosophical work (Philosophie der symbolischen formen, in 3 volumes, 1923-29; English translation The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1953-57) analyzed the common pre-logical processes underlying the formation of mental symbols in every known example of human culture. His Kantian orientation is also evident in Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910; English translation Substance and Function, 1923) in which he argued that the concept must exist within a human mind before the process of classifying particular perceptions can even begin. Mises openly displays his own Kantian, or neo-Kantian, sympathies by describing Cassirer's work as "brilliant."

Leopold von Wiese (1876 - 1969): German sociologist and economist. Born into a military family, Leo was educated first in cadet schools, and later at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He earned his PhD in economics in 1902. He moved up the academic ladder; in 1919 he was appointed Professor of Economic and Political Sciences at the University of Cologne. He was a fan of structural relationships, and defined society as a web of social relationships. Perhaps because of his military background, von Wiese included the laws of war among "social relationships". Mises criticizes this construction: war is always destructive, and nothing about war can be described as "social".

Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879 - 1952): Scottish engineer, economist, and social reformer. He had little formal education, but he was a member of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. He worked as an engineer for the Westinghouse Electric Company and for the Royal Air Force, among other firms. Douglas applied engineering principles to his study of economics. He "discovered" that the prices charged by going concerns are greater than the sum of salaries, wages, and dividends. [This is hardly surprising; he had ignored the cost of raw materials and any interest on debt. ed.] Based on this observation he devised a scheme of "social credit", which would employ "national dividends" and "just prices" to restore lost purchasing power to the "exploited" workers. Mises mentions him as one of the host of social reformers who have proposed to improve man's lot by lowering the interest rate to zero.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955): German physicist and philosopher. Einstein was, without question, the greatest theoretical physicist of the 20th century. A poor student, he eventually (1905) received a doctorate from the University at Zurich, and in that same year startled the world with his special theory of relativity, which satisfactorily explained the apparently anomalous result of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment of 1881. His corpuscular theory of light and his explanation of Brownian motion were also published in 1905. Einstein soon took a position as a professor of physics, first at Prague, then in Zurich, and finally (1914) in Berlin. His general theory of relativity, deduced from the principle that an observer in an accelerated frame of reference will see objects fall to the floor just as if they were subject to a Newtonian force of gravity, was published in 1916. Einstein's theory received experimental verification just three years later, when Sir Arthur Eddington led an expedition to Principe Island (off the coast of West Africa) and measured, during a total solar eclipse, an apparent shift in the position of some distant stars -- a shift caused by the sun's gravity -- that was predicted more precisely by general relativity than by Newton's theory. Physicists and cosmologists today are still grappling with the ramifications of this extraordinarily fertile and well-validated physical theory.

In 1921 Einstein received the Nobel prize in physics -- for his work on electrodynamics, and not for his theories of relativity. He was unhappy with the quantum theory then being developed by Bohr, Dirac, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg -- one of his famous statements about quantum mechanics is "God does not play dice with the universe." As the Weimar Republic fell apart around him, Einstein publicly opposed nationalism and national socialism, promoted pacifist ideals, and supported the burgeoning Zionist movement. When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and emigrated to the United States for a chair at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton. There he spent the remainder of his life working on his "unified field theory" (supposed to replace QM, but not yet brought to a successful conclusion by anybody), and supporting the ideals of peace, good will, and equal opportunity that had always been his guiding star.

A prolific author, Einstein also carried on an extensive correspondence with friends and admirers all around the world. He offered opinions on many subjects. Unlike most scientists of his generation, Einstein was neither a positivist nor an atheist. He publicly declared his belief in "Spinoza's God who reveals Himself in the harmony of what exists." As a senior statesman of physics he eventually gained renown as a philosopher of science, and it is in connection with Einstein's opinion of Kantianism that Mises quotes him:

How can mathematics, a product of human reason that does not depend on any experience, so exquisitely fit the objects of reality? Is human reason able to discover, unaided by experience, through pure reasoning, the features of real things? ... As far as the theorems of mathematics refer to reality they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Josef Stalin (1879 - 1953): Georgian revolutionary, Bolshevik, failed student of theology, and dictator of the USSR from 1929 until his death. Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, he adopted the name Koba ("The Indomitable") about 1905, and Stalin ("The Man of Steel") about 1913. Frequently exiled during the tumultuous years from 1905 - 1917, he joined Lenin in opposing the Mensheviks and gained a position of prominence within the Communist party. A master of intrigue, his career as dictator was marked by brutality and murder. Mises mentions his name in connection with Marxism and the failure of the Russian socialist experiment. To read more about him, click here.

Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940): Ukrainian revolutionary journalist, and one of the original organizers of the Communist party in Russia. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein, he was a revolutionary Marxist who got in trouble with the Tsar before his 19th birthday and was exiled from Russia several times before the 1917 revolution. He was close to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and after Lenin's death he opposed Stalin's autocratic regime. He was expelled from Russia in 1929, sentenced to death (in absentia) in 1937, and assassinated in 1940. Mises mentions his name to exemplify the ruthless infighting that dominated Communist politics. Here's a link to additional information about Trotsky.

Karel Engliš (1880 - 1961): Czech economist, civil servant, and political scientist. Engliš' family was poor. He attended the public grammar school in Opava, then enrolled in the University of Prague, receiving his degree in 1904. After a brief career in academia, he joined the civil service, serving first as Minister of Finance, and later as Governor of the National Bank of Czechoslokia. After WW II he was driven from office by the communists. Engliš was an Austrian economist. Mises quotes from his essay Begründung der Teleologie als Form des empirischen Erkennens (Justifying Teleology as a Form of Empirical Cognition) while discussing mechanical, as opposed to teleological, causation.

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 - 1944): English astronomer, physicist, and mathematician. Educated at Owens College and at Cambridge, he was appointed professor of astronomy at Cambridge in 1913. A year later he advanced the thesis, today a commonplace, that the fuzzy spiral nebulae observed with telescopes are in fact galaxies, like our own Milky Way. Born into a Quaker family, Eddington publicly identified himself as a pacifist during World War I. In 1919 he led an astronomical expedition whose measurements validated a prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity, and in 1923 released a treatise, The Mathematical Theory of Relativity, which Einstein himself praised as the finest presentation of general relativity in any language. During the 1920s and '30s Eddington wrote several popular accounts of relativity, and of cosmological theories based upon it; he did a great deal to familiarize the general public with Einstein's theories. He also wrote extensively on the epistemological basis of science, and it is in this connection -- particularly, that some physical quantities, just like subjective human values, cannot in principle be measured -- that Mises mentions his name.

Otto Neurath (1882 - 1945): Austrian philosopher and sociologist, Otto studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. He earned a PhD in political science and sociology from the University of Berlin in 1906. After a brief stint as a professor, Neurath took a job with the Austrian government. He joined the Social Democrats in 1918, and became involved with central planning. A few years later he opened a museum. In an effort to make the exhibits accessible to everyone, he developed a system of iconography known as ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education). Neurath was a logical positivist, and an influential member of the Vienna Circle. Mises mentions him as one of the socialists who believed that economic caalculation without money is actually possible.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 - 1945): American politician, 32nd president of the United States, and the only man ever to serve more than two terms as president. Educated in law, Roosevelt won his first election, as a New York state senator, in 1910. He served as assistant secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson during World War I. He was paralyzed by poliomyelitis in 1921, but by 1928 had recovered far enough to win election as governor of New York (although he suffered from partial paralysis for the rest of his life). He defeated Herbert Hoover in the presidential election of 1932, and was subsequently re-elected on three occasions ('36, '40, and '44). He died in 1945, leaving Harry Truman to bring World War II to its conclusion.

Rossevelt is both the most popular and the most deeply hated president in American history. His "New Deal" wrought tremendous changes in the structure and function of the federal government, and in the generally accepted interpretation of the U.S. constitution; and his plan for dividing the continent with an "Iron Curtain" -- by an agreement reached with Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in the conference at Yalta in 1944 -- produced far reaching and mostly negative effects in the subsequent history of Europe. Mises mentions his name merely in passing, using the presidential election of 1944 (vs. Dewey) as a concrete example of case probability (as opposed to class probability).

Moritz Schlick (1882 - 1936): German logician and epistemologist / philosopher. He studied physics, writing a thesis on the nature of truth in the empirical sciences. In 1922 he was appointed professor of the philosophy of empirical science at the University of Vienna. The Vienna Circle of logical positivists soon formed around him. He was editor of the journal Erkenntnis ("Knowledge"), and was philosophically aligned with Wittgenstein and other proponents of linguistic analysis. He met an untimely end, shot to death by a student whose thesis he had rejected. Mises does not mentipsychologion him directly, but speaks at length of the errors of positivism, which denies the reality of the a priori knowledge on which true economic science is based.

Lothar Gottlieb Tirala (1884 - 1974): Austrian physician, psychologist, zoologist, and Nazi eugenecist. Neurath studied zoology at the University of Vienna, earning a PhD in 1908. He subsequently obtained a PhD in medicine. After WW I, he practiced medicine as a gynecologist in Brno. From 1933 on he served Hitler as a "racial hygienist", or advocate for racial purity. Mises cites hia book Rasse, Geist und Seele (Race, Mind, and Soul) while discussing poylogism.

Frank Hyneman Knight (1885 - 1972): American econommist. Knight was born in Illinois and educated at Milligan College, the University of Tennessee, and Cornell University. After completing his PhD at Cornell, Knight settled in at the University of Chicago, where he spent most of his academic career. Knight mentored many famous students, including Milton Friedman, George Stigler, James Buchanan, and Ronald Coase, all four of whom were later awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Knight was instrumental in persuading Yale University Press to translate von Mises' Nationalökonomie: Theorie des Handelns und Wirtschaftens (Economics: Theory of Action and Economics) into English; this translation, with some new and updated material, became the first edition of Human Action. Mises cites Knight's work several times: In connection with indirect exchange; in connection with uncertainty; with reference to economics, interest, and the passage of time; and in respect of the theory of capital.

Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945): German dictator. Born Adolf Schicklgrüber. His father planned to educate him for the civil service, but Adolf aspired to be an artist. By 1904 he was a beggar in Vienna, and had acquired a permanent hatred of intellectuals and "gentlemen with diplomas." In 1913 he moved to Munich, and later volunteered for military service. He was wounded and gassed during World War I. He joined the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" as its seventh member in 1920, and in 1923 engineered a coup in Bavaria, which was brutally put down. Imprisoned for nine months, he used the time to write Mein Kampf. After his release from prison Hitler continued to build his political party, and in 1932 he challenged Hindenburg in the presidential elections. Although unsuccessful, he gained enough votes that the victors brought him into their government as chancellor in 1933. That was a terrible mistake -- within two months he had engineered the burning of the Reichstag, and arranged for special elections at which the Nazi party gained a bare majority.

In 1934 he ordered the murder of hundreds of his own opponents within the Nazi party, and when Hindenburg died in August of that year, Hitler was left the undisputed master of Germany. There is no need to detail here the subsequent events that marked his villainous and treacherous career, other than to say that his military aggressions against Poland and Austria sparked World War II; that he was a racist of the very worst kind whose proposed "Final Solution" of the "Jewish problem" led directly to the murder of at least six million innocent and unarmed people; and that he undoubtedly died in his bunker at Berlin on April 30, 1945. Winston Churchill described him aptly, as "a blood-thirsty guttersnipe." Mises identifies Hitler's ideology as a form of racial polylogism, speaks briefly of his crimes, and identifies him as the author of the "economic miracle" in Sweden between 1932 and 1939, when Germany's rearmament activity drove her neighbor's exports of iron through the roof.

Louis Auguste Paul Rougier (1889 - 1982): French epistemologist and philosopher of science. Rougier was a sickly child who excelled at intellectual pursuits. He earned a degree in philosophy from the University of Lyons in 1914, working as a high-school teacher and later as a professor at various institutions throughout Europe. He earned his PhD from the Sorbonne in 1920. Rougier continued his peripatetic career as a pedagogue, settling finally at the University of Besançon. His career was effectively ended in 1948, when he was accused of collaborating with the Vichy government. Rougier was the only French member of the Vienna Circle, and was regarded as a logical positivist. He developed a philosophy of logic that claims to be neither inductive nor deductive. Rather, he claimed, systems of logic are merely expedient devices for explaining the world. Rougier, after observing the Russian economy first-hand, concluded that a market economy works better than central planning. Mises cites Rougier's doctoral thesis, Les paralogismes du rationalisme: essai sur la théorie de la connaissance (The Paralogisms of Rationalism: An Essay on the Theory of Knowledge as an example of the eagerness with which rationalist philosophers seek to elucidate the limits of man's ability to ratiocinate.

Rudolph Carnap (1891 - 1970): Austrian philosopher whose work centered on the philosophy of science. Carnap was a member of the Vienna Circle, and a proponent of logical positivism. He regarded science as a primarily logical, and not entirely empirical, enterprise. Carnap laid great stress on syntactical structures, and aimed to construct a formal language for all the sciences. Mises derides the logical positivists for their support of socialsm.

Lancelot Hogben (1895 - 1975): British zoologist and author. Educated at the University of London and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Practiced experimental genetics in South Africa for a time, bur eventually returned to Engand. Hogben wrote two books (Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen) that were widely acclaimed as easy to read explications of the scientific method. Mises quotes his work while debunking the Marxian notion that science is a bourgeois ideology.

Felix Kaufmann (1895 - 1949): Austrian philosopher of law. Born and educated in Vienna, Kaufmann was a member of both the Vienna Circle and the Mises-Kreis, a group of scholars who met with Ludwig von Mises regularly to discuss the foundations of economics. Kaufmann left Vienna in 1938 and moved to New York City, where he served on the faculty of the New York Institute for Social Research until his death. Kaufmann wrote Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaften in 1936; Methododology of the Social Sciences, published in 1941 in New York, was substantially different, though it bore the same title. Mises cites Kaufmann's writings in discussing the epistemelogical basis of economics; and in describing the "irrational" preference orders that arise in the study of individual utility functions (e.g., a is preferred to b, and b is preferred to c, but c is preferred to a).

Lionel Robbins (1898 - 1984): British economist and educator. He received his early education at home, and in the local schools. He entered University College London in 1915, but soon left to serve in the army. He resumed his academic career at the London School of Economics in 1920, earning a B.S. in 1923. In 1929 he became professor of economics at LSE; he proceeded to hire several prominent economists, including Friedrich von Hayek. Robbins published his magnum opus, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, in 1931. At first a champion of free markets, Robbins eventually came out in support of interventionism. Mises cites his views on the individual's utility function, and also in connection witt the eventual consumption of capital goods.

Friedrich A. von Hayek (1899 - 1992): Austrian economist; joint recipient with Gunnar Myrdal of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974. His professorial career took him from Vienna to London (1931) and eventually to the United States (1950). A student of von Mises, his work illuminates the difficult problems inherent in every system of economic controls. His Nobel prize was awarded specifically for his contributions to the Austrian theory of the business cycle. Mises makes extensive references to Hayek's work on the theory of money, credit, and interest; on the business cycle; and on the problem of economic calculation in a socialist or welfare state system.

Alfred Schütz (1899 - 1959): Austrian philosopher and sociologist. Born in Vienna, Alfred was drafted into the Austrian army shortly after graduating from high school. In 1918 he enrolled in the University of Vienna, where he studied law, sociology, and business. He was a member of the Mises-Kreitz. He took a particular interest in Edmund Husserl's phenomonology, and in the sociological methods employed by Max Weber. Like many Viennese Jews of that era, Schütz fled the continent and moved to America when Hitler came to power. He settled at The New School in New York, where he taught classes until his death. His magnum opus, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehenden Soziologie (The Meaningful Structure of the Social World: An Introduction to Understanding Sociology) was published in Vienna in 1932. Mises mentions Schütz as an attendee at the seminars in Vienna, and cites his book while discussing the ego and the alter-egp.

Thomas Edmund Dewey (1902 - 71): American politician. Born in Michigan, Dewey got his law degree at Columbia and was elected DA for New York county in 1937, then governor of New York, from 1942 - '54. He was the (unsuccessful) Republican nominee for U.S. president in 1944 and again in 1948, and his fame rests on a photograph of the beaming, victorious Harry Truman holding a newspaper aloft -- the headline reads "DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN" -- the morning after the election. Mises mentions him merely in passing, using the presidential election of 1944 (vs. Roosevelt as a concrete exampleü of case probability (as opposed to class probability).

Oscar Morgenstern (1902 - 1977): Austrian economist and mathematician. Born in Germany, his family moved to Vienna when Oscar was still a child. He received a PhD in political science from the University of Vienna in 1925. He served as a professor in Vienna until 1938. He was also a member of the Mises-Kreis. Fortunately, he was visiting Princeton University when Hitler's Germany seized control of Austria. He decided to stay in America. Morgenstern met John von Neumann at Princeton; together they invented game theory, publishing Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1941. Mises did not agree that economics is a game; he ridicules the notion of economics as a game while discussing the uncertain future.

John von Neumann (1903 - 1957): Hungarian mathematician and theoretical physicist known for his extraordinary mental quickness. Born in Budapest, he escaped from the Bolsheviks in 1919 and studied chemistry in Switzerland and later Germany. There he met the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer; he emigrated to the United States and in 1931 was appointed to a professorship at Princeton University. He worked on the Manhattan project at Los Alamos, where he made important contributions not only to the theory of nuclear fission, but also to the design and implementation of computing hardware. Mises refers to his seminal book on game theory written in collaboration with Oscar Morgenstern: Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944). In Mises' view, von Neumann's thesis in this book is fundamentally incorrect because man's economic behavior is not a game. In a game, there are winners and losers; but in a free market economy, every participant gains things he could not possibly have if the market did not exist.