Online Mises archive is boon to Austrian School scholars

After his death more than 50 years ago, famed economist Ludwig von Mises’ papers and library were entrusted to Grove City College, home of the country’s leading undergraduate Austrian School economics program.

The 20,000-page archive has yielded a raft of academic papers, journal articles, books, and more in the decades since, but only for scholars who could make the pilgrimage to the College and put in the hours and days necessary to study Mises’ letters, manuscripts, monographs, and notes in person.

But that is about to change. A years-long effort to fully digitize the archive was recently completed and now scholars can access the documents online – anywhere, anytime – at gcc.historyit.com .

The Mises collection is a magnet for visiting scholars, according to College Archivist Hilary Walczak ’09, who oversaw the digitization effort and fields regular requests for items from researchers around the world.

“Usage, or the desire to use it, is high. Having it all online creates a valuable resource for the economics community,” she said. “Prior to digitization, it could take months for us to meet a request for a researcher. Now we can provide these resources to everyone.”

Getting the collection online is a significant moment for students of the Austrian School and Mises, according to Dr. Jeffrey M. Herbener, chair of Grove City College’s Department of Economics. “By giving access to interested scholars around the world, the Mises digital archive will stimulate new lines of research on the Misesian approach to economics,” he said.

Hewing to that same approach for the last eight decades has made the College an economics powerhouse, punching far above its weight in scholarship and advocacy for the Austrian School, which puts human action at the center of the study of what some call “the dismal science.”

Over a career that spanned two World Wars and the Cold War, Mises advanced a case for free markets and limited government intervention that influenced key economic voices, including Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard, and provided a crucial counterpoint to postwar economic orthodoxy.

“He had the fortune – or misfortune you could say – to live through the 20th century, which had enough seismic events for any social scientist ... That's Mises’ entire career and he was at the center of those debates so he has this central figure in economics in the 20th century,” said Grove City College alumnus Dr. Peter Boettke ’83, distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University and the director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center.

“Ludwig von Mises was one of the most important economists of the 20^th century … and possibly the most important economist of all times,” according to Jörg Guido Hülsmann, professor of economics at the University of Angers, France. “He gave a new scientific foundation to the science of economics. Mises argued that the laws of economics were a priori laws – that there were purely logical relationships between cause and effect which could be understood.”

Hülsmann, author of “Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism,” is the keynote speaker at this month’s Austrian Student Scholars Conference at Grove City College. The annual conference is one way that the College stimulates student work within the Austrian framework. It provides a forum for students from Grove City and other colleges and universities to present papers and research, network with faculty and other experts, and learn about opportunities like internships and summer programs.

The College’s Austrian heritage dates to the mid-1950s when Dr. Hans Sennholz joined the faculty as chair of the Department of Economics. Sennholz, a German emigree, was a student of Mises and centered the program that he led for 36 years on Austrian School principles, which influenced and inspired the thinking of generations of students.

Mises’ contributions to the study of economics are outstanding, Herbener said. “He gave us the explanation of the business cycle – why we see these ups and downs in the economy and what policies should be implemented to mitigate or even eliminate them. He gave a devastating critique of socialism and central planning where he showed that this is not an arrangement for a modern economy that is workable at all.”

The questions that Mises asks and answers have important consequences for the welfare of billions, Dr. Caleb S. Fuller ’13, associate professor of Economics, said. “Mises was interested in the most foundational questions in social science. He is interested in anthropology. What is a human being? What is the nature of the human person? Why is it that some societies are so fabulously wealthy while other societies languish in squalor?”

Those questions persist and there are more scholars working in the Austrian tradition than ever before because of the efforts of Mises, Sennholz, and institutions like Grove City College. Their work is important, said Dr. Shawn Ritenour, professor of Economics.

“What our society needs now, more than ever, is economic wisdom. We need people to understand how the economy really works. We’re trying to break down the barrier between the artificial ‘classroom’ and the ‘real world’,” Ritenour said.

The Mises Digital Archive promises to contribute greatly to Mises and Austrian School research. “The Ludwig von Mises collection at Grove City College is one of the most important scholarly collections of original material anywhere in the world,” Fuller said.

Grove City College became home to the Mises collection in 1978 when the economist’s widow Margit von Mises sought out Sennholz to make the College the permanent home to his papers and library.

The College has been working on digitizing the collection in-house for years. Last year funding was provided to complete the job, and 90 boxes of documents were shipped to Portland, Maine, where they were processed by HistoryIT, a digital archive service. A video "Economics Past and Present: The New Mises Digital Archive at Grove City College" is available on YouTube.

The Department of Economics is part of the Winklevoss School of Business at Grove City College. It offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in Economics and Business Economics. For more, visit gcc.edu/econ.

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