Ludwig von Mises

Born in Austria-Hungary in 1881, Mises made his name in Vienna writing and lecturing on classical liberalism and the role of consumers in shaping markets, comparing communism and capitalism as Europe lurched toward illiberalism. In 1949 he published Human Action, laying out praxeology - a method that rejected empirical modeling in favor of deducing economic behavior from the logic of individual choice. He'd already been running a private seminar in Vienna that trained a generation; later, teaching at New York University, he shaped Hayek, Rothbard, and Kirzner, who went on to build the Foundation for Economic Education and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. By the time he died in 1973, the Austrian school and the libertarian movement bore his stamp, and economists were calling his work among the most important of the century.