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This is my little treatise on some of the positive products of Western Civilisation.

On this board we often, rightly so, highlight the evils that white men do. This is not because other men are not evil but because white men's evil has visibly gotten out of hand. And we can't let these little men destroy humanity while we just stand by and watch.

So!

Without further ado, I will start my presentation on the good white men (though few) that this beautiful world of ours has produced.


Our jump-off character has to be a personal favorite of mine, Alan Watts, who is not only British but suprisingly, an English man through and through.

ALAN WATTS

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Early years

Watts was born to middle class parents in the village of Chislehurst (now in the London Borough of Bromley), Kent, England in the year 1915. His father was a representative for the London office of the Michelin Tyre Company, his mother a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in bucolic surroundings and Alan, an only child, grew up learning the names of wild flowers and butterflies, playing beside streams, and performing funeral ceremonies for birds.

Probably because of the influence of his mother’s religious family, the Buchans, an interest in "ultimate things" seeped in. But it mixed with Alan’s own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East. Watts also later wrote of a mystical sort of vision he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. During this time he was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries that had been given to his mother by missionaries returning from China. With regard to the examples of Chinese paintings that he was able to see in England, Watts wrote "I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float..." [as presented in his autobiography]. These works of art emphasized the participative relationship of man in nature, a theme that would be important to him throughout his life.

Buddhism


By his own assessment, Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative. He was sent to boarding schools (which included both academic and religious training) from early years. During holidays in his teen years, Francis Croshaw, a wealthy epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and the exotic little-known aspects of European culture, took Watts on a trip through France. It was not long afterward that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaw’s. He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge which had been established by Theosophists, and was now run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys. Watts became the organization’s secretary at 16 (1931). The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.

Education

Watts attended King's School next door to Canterbury Cathedral. Though he was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically, and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was read as presumptuous and capricious.[citation needed]

Hence, when he graduated from secondary school, Watts was thrust into the world of employment, working in a printing house and later a bank. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" named Dimitrije Mitrinović. (Mitrinović was himself influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the varied psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler.) Watts also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom.

Influences and first publication

London afforded him a considerable number of other opportunities for personal growth. Through Humphreys, he contacted eminent spiritual authors (e.g., Nicholas Roerich, Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan) and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey. In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D.T. Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. Beyond these discussions and personal encounters, he absorbed, by studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia. In 1936, Watts's first book was published, The Spirit of Zen, which he later acknowledged to be mainly digested from the writings of Suzuki.

In 1938 he and his bride left England to live in America. He had married Eleanor Everett, whose mother Ruth Fuller Everett was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. A few years later, Ruth Fuller married the Zen master (or "roshi"), Sokei-an Sasaki, and this Japanese gentleman served as a sort of model and mentor to Alan, though Watts chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with Sasaki.

During these years, according to his later writings, Watts had another mystical experience while on a walk with his wife.

Priesthood and after

Watts had left formal Zen training in New York because the method of the teacher didn't suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a professional outlet for his philosophical inclinations. He entered an Anglican (Episcopalian) school (Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, in Evanston, Illinois), where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and Church history. He attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts was awarded a master's degree in theology in response to his thesis, which he published as a popular edition under the title Behold the Spirit. The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that he decided were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing, whether found within Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as Episcopalian priest (beginning in 1945, aged 30), until an extramarital affair resulted in his young wife having their marriage annulled. It also resulted in Watts leaving the ministry by 1950. He spent the New Year getting to know Joseph Campbell; his wife, Jean Erdman; and John Cage.

In the spring of 1951, Watts moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Here he taught alongside Saburo Hasegawa, Frederick Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tokwan Tada, and various visiting experts and professors. Hasegawa, in particular, served as a teacher to Watts in the areas of Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature.

Watts also studied written Chinese and practiced Chinese brush calligraphy with Hasegawa as well as with some of the Chinese students who enrolled at the Academy. While Watts was noted for an interest in Zen Buddhism, with its origins in China, his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta, "the new physics," cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.

Middle years

After heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid 1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long-running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, which continued until his death in 1973. Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts; they did, however, gain him a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area. These programs were later carried by additional Pacifica stations, and were re-broadcast many times over in the decades following his death. The original tapes are currently held by the Pacifica Radio Archives, based at KPFK in Los Angeles.

In 1957 when 42, Watts published one of his best known books, The Way of Zen, which focused on philosophical explication and history. Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen, in India and China, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics (directly from the writings of Alfred Korzybski) and also from Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published). Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life. The book sold well, eventually becoming a modern classic, and helped widen his lecture circuit.

Around this time, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. In relation to modern psychology, Watts's instincts were closer to Jung's or Abraham Maslow's than to those of Freud.

Experimentation

When he returned to the United States, he began to dabble in psychedelic drug experiences, initially with mescaline given to him by Dr. Oscar Janiger. He tried LSD several times with various research teams led by Drs. Keith Ditman, Sterling Bunnell, and Michael Agron. He also tried DMT, later stating that it was 'like loading the Universe into a gun and firing it into your brain'. Watts’s books of the sixties reveal the influence of these chemical adventures on his outlook. He would later comment about psychedelic drug use, "When you get the message, hang up the phone." [1]

For a time, Watts came to prefer writing in the language of modern science and psychology (Psychotherapy East and West is a good example), finding a parallel between mystical experiences and the theories of the material universe proposed by twentieth-century physicists. He later equated mystical experience with ecological awareness, and typically emphasized whichever approach seemed best suited to the audience he was addressing.

Supporters and critics

Watts's explorations and teaching brought him into contact with many noted intellectuals, artists, and American teachers in the human potential movement. His friendship with poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support. He also encountered Robert Anton Wilson, who credited Watts with being one of his 'Light[s] along the Way' in the opening appreciation of Cosmic Trigger.

Though never affiliated for long with any one academic institution, he did have a fellowship for several years at Harvard University. He also lectured to many college and university students. His lectures and books gave Watts far-reaching influence on the American intelligentsia of the 1950s-1970s, but Watts was often seen as an outsider in academia. While some college and university professors found his writing and lectures interesting, others said things like: "He's not really a scholar of Eastern philosophy. He's not that disciplined. Alan Watts doesn't teach Eastern philosophy, he teaches 'Alan Watts.'"[citation needed] To which he replied in numerous lectures that "the scholar who is interested in medals and prizes and not interested in the fun of it, has amazing put downs." He pointed this out with an example: "The original scholars in history were men that owned land, and being rich they had enough free time to study in their library, not for the progress of science, but for fun." Another Japanese Zen master, Maezumi Roshi, however, once remarked, "Alan Watts? He is not Zen!"[citation needed]

Applied aesthetics

Watts often wrote about, or sometimes alluded to, a group of neighbors in Druid Heights[2] (near Mill Valley, California), who had endeavored to combine architecture, gardening, and carpentry skills to make a beautiful and comfortable life for themselves. Druid Heights was founded by the writer Elsa Gidlow.

Regarding his intentions, it can be argued that Watts attempted to lessen the alienation that accompanies the experience of being human that he felt plagued the modern Westerner, and (like his fellow British expatriate and friend, Aldous Huxley) to lessen the ill will that was an unintentional by-product of alienation from the natural world. He felt such teaching could improve the world, at least to a degree. He also articulated the possibilities for greater incorporation of aesthetics (for example: better architecture, more art, more fine cuisine) in American life. In his autobiography he wrote, "… cultural renewal comes about when highly differentiated cultures mix" (Watts, In My Own Way).

The spiritual aspect of sex

In his last novel Island, Aldous Huxley mentions the religious practice of maithuna as being something like what Roman Catholics call "coitus reservatus". A few years before, Alan Watts had discussed the theme in his own book Nature, Man and Woman. There, he discusses the possibility of the practice being known to early Christians and of it being kept secretly by the Church. Such a possibility is undeniable among a select few in the Church and outside of it (e. g. Freemasonry) for that matter but it would be rather naive to believe that the Pope might be all for it. Pope Pius XII in citing Pope Pius XI Encyclical Casti Connubii stands firm in the belief that only the sex act of holy matrimony leading to procreation is moral and he goes on "... This precept is in full force today, as it was in the past, and so it will be in the future also, and always, because it is not a simple human whim, but the expression of a natural and divine law."[3]

Later years


In his writings of the 1950s, he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of Chán (Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects, builders, folk physicians, artists, and administrators among the monks who had lived in the monasteries of its lineages.

In his mature work, he presents himself as "Zennist" in spirit as he wrote in his last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way[4]. Child rearing, the arts, cuisine, education, law and freedom, architecture, sexuality, and the uses and abuses of technology were all of great interest to him.

On the personal level, Watts sought to resolve his feelings of alienation from the institutions of marriage and the values of American society, as revealed in his classic comments on love relationships in "Divine Madness" and on perception of the organism-environment in "The Philosophy of Nature".

In looking at social issues he was quite concerned with the necessity for international peace, for tolerance or even understanding among disparate cultures. He also came to feel acutely conscious of a growing ecological predicament; as one instance, in the early 1960s he wrote: “Can any melting or burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin – especially when the things we make and build are beginning to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away?" (in The Joyous Cosmology). These concerns were later expressed in a television pilot made for NET filmed at his mountain retreat in 1971 in which he noted that the single track of conscious attention was wholly inadequate for interactions with a multi-tracked world.

Political stance

In his writings; Watts alluded to his own political shift from Republican conservatism to a more libertarian legal and political outlook.[5] Distrusting both the established political left and right, he found inspiration in the Chinese sage Chuang-Tzu. He disliked much in the conventional idea of "progress". He hoped for change, but personally he preferred amiable, semi-isolated rural social enclaves, and also believed in tolerance for urban tenderloins, social misfits, and eccentric artists. Watts decried the suburbanization of the countryside and the way of life that went with it.

In one campus lecture tour, which Watts titled "The End to the Put-Down of Man", Watts presented positive images for both nature and humanity, spoke in favor of the various stages of human growth (including the teenage years), reproached excessive cynicism and rivalry, and extolled intelligent creativity, good architecture and food.

On spiritual and social identity

Watts felt that absolute morality had nothing to do with the fundamental realization of one’s deep spiritual identity. He advocated social rather than personal ethics. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens. He wrote out of an appreciation of a racially and culturally diverse social landscape. At the same time, he favored representative government rather than direct democracy (which he felt could readily degenerate into mob rule ).

He often said that he wished to act as a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, and between culture and nature.

Watts led some tours for Westerners to the Buddhist temples of Japan. He also studied some movements from the traditional Chinese martial art T'ai Chi Ch'uan, with an Asian colleague, Al Chung-liang Huang. Watts lived his later years at times on a houseboat in Sausalito on San Francisco Bay and at times in a secluded cabin on Mount Tamalpais. Laden with social and financial responsibilities, he struggled increasingly with alcohol addiction, which probably shortened his life.[6] In October 1973 he returned from an exhausting European lecture tour. Watts died of heart failure in his sleep at his home on Mt. Tamalpais the following month at the age of 58.

Worldview

In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science; in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Maya (illusion)), hiding from itself by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourself as an "ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.

Family life
Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (July 2008)

Alan Watts was married three times and had seven children including two sons, the elder of whom, Mark Watts, has recently served as curator of his father's work.

He met Eleanor Everett in 1936, when her mother, Ruth Fuller Everett, brought her to London to study piano. They met at the Buddhist Lodge, were engaged the following year, and married in April 1938. A daughter, Joan, was born November 1938, and another, Ann, was born in 1943. Their marriage ended eleven years later, but Watts continued after that to correspond with his ex-mother-in-law.[7]

Books

* 1936 The Spirit of Zen, Paperback. 1969 ISBN 0-8021-3056-9
* 1937 The Legacy of Asia and Western Man
* 1940 The Meaning of Happiness, Paperback. 1970, ISBN 0-06-080178-6
* 1944 Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius, (translation from Greek of pseudo-Dionysius, now available online)
* 1948 Behold the Spirit:A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, Vintage ed. 1972, ISBN 0-394-71761-9
* 1950 Easter - Its Story and Meaning
* 1950 The Supreme Identity, Vintage ed. 1972, ISBN 0-394-71835-6
* 1951 The Wisdom of Insecurity, Vintage ed. 1968, ISBN 0-394-70468-1
* 1953 Myth and Ritual in Christianity, Beacon Press 1971, ISBN 0-8070-1375-7
* 1957 The Way of Zen, Vintage Spiritual Classics 1999, ISBN 0-375-70510-4
* 1958 Nature, Man, and Woman, Vintage reissue 1991, ISBN 0-679-73233-0
* 1960 "This Is It" and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, Vintage reprint 1973, ISBN 0-394-71904-2
* 1961 Psychotherapy East and West, Vintage ed. 1975, ISBN 0-394-71609-4 (excerpt here)
* 1962 The Joyous Cosmology - Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
* 1963 The Two Hands of God - The Myths of Polarity
* 1964 Beyond Theology - The Art of Godmanship, Vintage 1973, ISBN 0-394-71923-9
* 1966 The Book - On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Vintage reissue 1989, ISBN 0-679-72300-5 (excerpt here)
* 1967 Nonsense, ISBN 0-525-47463-3. This book is an interesting spiritual application of literary nonsense.
* 1970 Does It Matter?: Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality, Vintage ed. 1971, ISBN 0-394-71665-5
* 1971 Erotic Spirituality - The Vision of Konarak
* 1972 The Art of Contemplation
* 1972 In My Own Way - An Autobiography 1915-1965, Vintage 1973, ISBN 0-394-71951-4
* 1973 Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal, Vintage 1974, ISBN 0-394-71999-9

Posthumous publications

* 1974 The Essence of Alan Watts, Celestial Arts 1977, ISBN 0-89087-210-4
* 1975 Tao: The Watercourse Way, with Al Chung-liang Huang, Pantheon 1977, ISBN 0-394-73311-8
* 1976 Essential Alan Watts
* 1978 Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life
* 1979 Om: Creative Meditations
* 1982 Play to Live
* 1983 Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self
* 1985 Out of the Trap
* 1986 Diamond Web
* 1987 The Early Writings of Alan Watts, Paperback. 1995, ISBN 0-89087-794-7
* 1990 The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings
* 1994 Talking Zen
* 1995 Become What You Are, Shambhala Expanded ed. 2003, ISBN 1-57062-940-4
* 1995 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion
* 1995 The Philosophies of Asia
* 1995 The Tao of Philosophy, edited transcripts, Tuttle Publishing 1999, ISBN 0-8048-3204-8
* 1996 Myth and Religion
* 1997 Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking
* 1997 Zen and the Beat Way
* 1998 Culture of Counterculture
* 1999 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion, edited transcripts, Tuttle Publishing, ISBN 0-8048-3203-X
* 2000 What Is Zen?, editor: Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 0-394-71951-4
* 2000 What Is Tao?, ed. Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 1-57731-168-X
* 2000 Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation, ed. Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 1-57731-214-7
* 2000 Eastern Wisdom, ed. Mark Watts, MJF Books, ISBN 1-56731-491-0, three books in one volume: What is Zen?, What is Tao?, and An Introduction to Meditation (Still the Mind). These were assembled from transcriptions of audio tape recordings made by his son Mark, of lectures and seminars given by Alan Watts during the last decade of his life. They constitute simplified introductions to the philosophies he taught.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts

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Posts: 1819 | From: odesco baba | Registered: Feb 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Lord Sauron:
At the same time, he favored representative government rather than direct democracy (which he felt could readily degenerate into mob rule ).

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What an insight! I'm a mega fan of Alan Watts too. He gives the most brilliant articulations in English of Eastern philosophies (especially Zen Bhuddism).

Posts: 3423 | From: the jungle - when y'all stop playing games, call me. | Registered: Jul 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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One of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig von Mises, in the course of a long and highly productive life, developed an integrated, deduct­ive science of economics based on the fundamental axiom that in­dividual human beings act purposively to achieve desired goals. Even though his economic analysis itself was “value-free” — in the sense of being irrelevant to values held by economists — Mises concluded that the only viable economic policy for the human race was a policy of unrestricted laissez-faire, of free markets and the unhampered exercise of the right of private property, with government strictly limited to the defense of person and property within its territorial area.

For Mises was able to demonstrate (a) that the expansion of free markets, the division of labor, and private capital investment is the only possible path to the prosperity and flourishing of the human race; (b) that socialism would be disastrous for a modern economy because the absence of private ownership of land and capital goods prevents any sort of rational pricing, or estimate of costs, and (c) that government intervention, in addition to hampering and crippling the market, would prove counter-productive and cumulative, leading inevitably to socialism unless the entire tissue of interventions was repealed.

Holding these views, and hewing to truth indomitably in the face of a century increasingly devoted to statism and collectivism, Mises became famous for his “intransigence” in insisting on a non-inflationary gold standard and on laissez-faire.

Effectively barred from any paid university post in Austria and later in the United States, Mises pursued his course gallantly. As the chief economic adviser to the Austrian government in the 1920s, Mises was single-handedly able to slow down Austrian inflation; and he developed his own “private seminar” which attracted the out­standing young economists, social scientists, and philosophers throughout Europe. As the founder of the "neo-Austrian School" of economics, Mises’s business cycle theory, which blamed inflation and depressions on inflationary bank credit encouraged by Central Banks, was adopted by most younger economists in England in the early 1930s as the best explanation of the Great Depression.

Having fled the Nazis to the United States, Mises did some of his most important work here. In over two decades of teaching, he inspired an emerging Austrian School in the United States. The year after Mises died in 1973, his most distinguished follower, F.A. Hayek, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in elaborat­ing Mises’s business cycle theory during the later 1920s and 1930s.

Mises was born on Sept 29, 1881, in the city of Lemberg (now Lvov) in Galicia, where his father, a Viennese construction engineer working for the Austrian railroads, was then stationed. Both Mises’s father and mother came from prominent Viennese families; his mother’s uncle, Dr Joachim Landau, served as deputy from the Liberal Party in the Austrian Parliament.

Entering the University of Vienna at the turn of the century as a leftist interventionist, the young Mises discovered Principles of Economics by Carl Menger, the founding work of the Austrian School of economics, and was quickly converted to the Austrian emphasis on individual action rather than unrealistic mechanistic equations as the unit of economics analysis, and to the importance of a free-market economy.

Mises became a prominent post-doctoral student in the famous University of Vienna seminar of the great Austrian economist Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk (among whose many accomplishments was the devastating refutation of the Marxian labor theory of value).

During this period, in his first great work, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912) Mises performed what had been deemed an impossible task: to integrate the theory of money into the general theory of marginal utility and price (what would now be called integrating “macroeconomics” into “microeconomics.”) Since Bohm-Bawerk and his other Austrian colleagues did not accept Mises’s integration and remained without a monetary theory, he was therefore obliged to strike out on his own and found a “neo­-Austrian” school.

In his monetary theory, Mises revived the long forgotten British Currency School principle, prominent until the 1850s, that society does not at all benefit from any increase in the money supply, that increased money and bank credit only causes inflation and business cycles, and that therefore government policy should maintain the equivalent of a 100 percent gold standard.

Mises added to this insight the elements of his business cycle theory: that credit expansion by the banks, in addition to causing inflation, makes depressions inevitable by causing “malinvestment,” i.e. by inducing businessmen to overinvest in “higher orders” of capital goods (machine tools, construction, etc.) and to underinvest in consumer goods.

The problem is that inflationary bank credit, when loaned to business, masquerades as pseudo-savings, and makes businessmen believe that there are more savings available to invest in capital goods production than consumers are genuinely willing to save. Hence, an inflationary boom requires a recession which becomes a painful but necessary process by which the market liquidates unsound investments and reestablishes the investment and production structure that best satisfies consumer preferences and demands.

Mises, and his follower Hayek, developed this cycle theory during the 192Os, on the basis of which Mises was able to warn an unheeding world that the widely trumpeted “New Era” of permanent prosperity of the 192Os was a sham, and that its inevitable result would be bank panic and depression. When Hayek was invited to teach at the London School of Economics in 1931 by an influential former student at Mises’s private seminar, Lionel Robbins, Hayek was able to convert most of the younger English economists to this perspective. On a collision course with John Maynard Keynes and his disciples at Cambridge, Hayek demolished Keynes’s Treatise on Money, but lost the battle and most of his followers to the tidal wave of the Keynesian Revolution that swept the economic world after the publication of Keynes’s General Theory in 1936.

The policy prescriptions for business cycles of Mises-Hayek and of Keynes were diametrically opposed. During a boom period, Mises counseled the immediate end of all bank credit and monetary expansion; and, during a recession, he advised strict laissez-faire, allowing the readjustment forces of the recession to work themselves out as rapidly as possible.

Not only that: for Mises the worst form of intervention would be to prop up prices or wage rates, causing unemployment, to increase the money supply, or to boost government spending in order to stimulate consumption. For Mises, the recession was a problem of under-saving, and over-consumption, and it was therefore important to encourage savings and thrift rather than the opposite, to cut government spending rather than increase it. It is clear that, from 1936 on Mises was totally in opposition to the worldwide fashion in macroeconomic policy.

Socialism-communism had triumphed in Russia and in much of Europe during and after World War I, and Mises was moved to publish his famous article, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” (1920) in which he demonstrated that it would be impossible for a socialist planning board to plan a modern economic system; furthermore, no attempt at artificial “markets” would work, since a genuine pricing and costing system requires an exchange of property titles, and therefore private property in the means of production.

Mises developed the article into his book Socialism(1922), a comprehensive philosophical and sociological, as well as economic critique which still stands as the most thorough and devastating demolition of socialism ever written. Mises’s Socialism converted many prominent economists and social philosophers out of socialism, including Hayek, the German Wilhelm Ropke, and the Englishman Lionel Robbins.

In the United States, the publication of the English translation of Socialism in 1936 attracted the admiration of the prominent economic journalist Henry Hazlitt, who reviewed it in the New York Times, and converted one of America’s most prominent and learned Communist fellow-travelers of the period, J.B. Matthews, to a Misesian position and to opposition to all forms of socialism.

Socialists throughout Europe and the United States worried about the problem of economic calculation under socialism for about fifteen years, finally pronouncing the problem solved with the promulgation of the “market socialism” model of the Polish economist Oskar Lange in 1936. Lange returned to Poland after World War II to help plan Polish Communism. The collapse of socialist planning, in Poland and the other Communist countries in 1989, left Establishment economists across the ideological spectrum, all of whom bought the Lange “solution”, mightily embarrassed.

Some prominent socialists, such as Robert Heilbroner, have had the grace to admit publicly that “Mises was right” all along (the phrase “Mises was Right” was the title of a panel at the annual 1990 meeting of the Southern Economic Association at New Orleans).

If socialism was an economic catastrophe, government inter­vention could not work, and would tend to lead inevitably to socialism. Mises elaborated these insights in his Critique of Interventionism (1929), and set forth his political philosophy of laissez-faire liberalism in his Liberalism (1927).

In adition to setting himself against all the political trends of the twentieth century, Mises combated with equal fervor and eloquence what he considered the disastrous dominant philosophical and methodological trends, in economics and other disciplines. These included positivism, relativism, historicism, polylogism” the idea that each race and gender has its own “logic” and there­fore cannot communicate with other groups), and all forms of irrationalism and denial of objective truth. Mises also developed what he considered to be the proper methodology of economic theory--logical deduction from evident axioms, which he labeled “praxeo­logy”, and he leveled trenchant critiques of the growing tendency in economics and other disciplines to replace praxeology and histor­ical understanding by unrealistic mathematical models and statistical manipulations.

Emigrating to the United States in 1940, Mises’s first two books in English were important and influential. His Omnipotent Government (1944) was the first book to challenge the then-standard Marxian view that fascism and Nazism were imposed upon their nations by big business and the “capitalist class.” His Bureaucracy (1944) was a still unsurpassed analysis of why government operation must necessarily be “bureaucratic” and suffer from all the ills of bureaucracy.

Mises’s most monumental achievement was his Human Action (1949), the first comprehensive treatise on economic theory written since the first World War. Here Mises took up the challenge of his own methodology and research program and elaborated an integrated and massive structure of economic theory on his own deductive, “praxeological” principles. Published in an era when economists and governments generally were totally dedicated to statism and Keynesian inflation, Human Action was unread by the economics profession. Finally, in 1957 Mises published his last major work, Theory and History, which, in addition to refutations of Marxism and historicism, set forth the basic differences and functions of theory and of history in economics as well as all the various disciplines of human action.

In the United States as in his native Austria, Mises could not find a paid post in academia. New York University, where he taught from until 1945 until his retirement at the age of 88 in 1969, would only designate him as Visiting Professor, and his salary had to be paid by the conservative-libertarian William Volker Fund until 1962, and after that by a consortium of free-market foundations and businessmen. Despite the unfavorable climate, Mises inspired a growing group of students and admirers, cheer­fully encouraged their scholarship, and himself continued his remarkable productivity.

Mises was also sustained by and worked together with free­-market and libertarian admirers. From its origin in 1946 until his death, Mises was a part-time staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York; and he was in the 1950s an economic advisor to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) working with their laissez-faire wing which finally lost out to the tide of “enlightened” statism.

As a free trader and a classical liberal in the tradition of Cobden, Bright, and Spencer, Mises was a libertarian who champ­ioned reason and individual liberty in personal as well as eco­nomic matters. As a rationalist and an opponent of statism in all its forms, Mises would never call himself a “conservative,” but rather a liberal in the nineteenth-century sense.

Indeed, Mises was politically a laissez-faire radical, who denounced tariffs, immigration restrictions, or governmental attempts to enforce morality. On the other hand, Mises was a staunch cultural and sociological conservative, who attacked egalitarianism, strongly denounced political feminism as a facet of socialism. In contrast to many conservative critics of capitalism, Mises held that personal morality and the nuclear family were both essential to, and fostered by, a system of free-market capitalism.

Mises’s influence was remarkable, considering the unpopularity of his epistemological and political views. His students of the 1920s, even those who later became Keynesians, were permanently stamped by a visible Misesian influence. These students included, in addition to Hayek and Robbins, Fritz Machlup, Gottfried von Haberler, Oskar Morgenstern, Alfred Schutz, Hugh Gaitskell, Howard S. Ellis, John Van Sickle, and Erich Voegelin.

In France, General DeGaulle’s major economic and monetary adviser, who helped swing France away from socialism, was Jacques Rueff, an old-friend and admirer of Mises. And part of post-World War II Italy’s shift away from socialism was due to its President Luigi Einaudi, a distinguished economist and long-time friend and free-market colleague of Mises. In the United States, Mises was scarcely as influential. Under less promising academic conditions, his students and admirers included Henry Hazlitt, Lawrence Fertig, Percy Greaves, Jr., Bettina Bien Graeves, Hans F. Sennholz, William H. Peterson, Louis M. Spadaro, Israel M. Kirzner, Ralph Raico, George Reisman, and Murray N. Rothbard. But Mises was able to build a remarkably strong and loyal following among businessmen and other non-academics; his massive and complex Human Action has sold extraordinarily well ever since the year of its original publication.

Since Mises’s death in New York City on October 10, 1973 at the age of 92, Misesian doctrine and influence has experienced a ren­aissance. The following year saw not only Hayek’s Nobel Prize for Misesian cycle theory, but also the first of many Austrian School conferences in the United States. Books by Mises have been reprinted and collections of his articles translated and published. Courses and programs in Austrian Economics have been taught and established throughout the country.

Taking the lead in this revival of Mises and in the study and expansion of Misesian doctrine has been the Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded by Lle­wellyn Rockwell, Jr. in 1982 and headquartered in Auburn, Alabama. The Mises Institute publishes scholarly journals and books, and offers courses in elementary, intermediate and advanced Austrian economics, which attract in­creasing numbers of students and professors. Undoubtedly, the collapse of socialism and the increased attractiveness of the free market have greatly contributed to this upsurge of popularity.

http://mises.org/about/3248

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