TEACHER OF LIBERTY
Economist and Mises student Hans F. Sennholz served as a powerful impact on today’s culture
BY LEW ROCKWELL

Lew Rockwell is a paleolibertarian political commentator and economist in the United States. Rockwell is the founder and President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama and Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies. Other stories by Lew Rockwell

Hans F. Sennholz — who died on June 23 at the age of 85 — was one of the handful of economists who dared defend free markets and sound money during the dark years before the Misesian revival, and who did so with eloquence, precision and brilliance. From his post at Grove City College, and his lectures around the world, he produced untold numbers of students who looked to him as the formative influence in their lives. He was a leading public voice for freedom in times when such voices have been exceedingly rare.

Sennholz was the first student in the United States to write a dissertation and receive a Ph.D. under the guidance of Ludwig von Mises. Mises had only recently completed Human Action. Imagine how having such an outstanding student, and a native German speaker no less, must have affected Mises’ life, how it must have encouraged him to know that his work could continue through outstanding thinkers such as this.

His dissertation became the book How Can Europe Survive, published in 1955. It remains the best and most complete critique of European political union ever written. Sennholz demonstrated, some 50 years before others even cared, that political union under the interventionist-welfare state was only a prescription for chaos and bureaucrat rule. True union, he demonstrated, comes from free trade and decentralized states that do not attempt to plan their economies.

Sennholz followed up this treatise, which included an account of the Great Depression and the onset of war, with a long string of trenchant writings on monetary theory and history, on employment, on fiscal policy and even on the moral basis of freedom. Truly he followed in Mises’ footsteps, and, like Mises, he refused to let the ideological hostility of his age and ours deter him from speaking truth to power, using every means at his disposal.

At Margit von Mises’ request, Sennholz was the translator of Mises’ Notes and Recollections, which is the closest thing we have to an autobiography. It has been this book, above all else, that has shaped the way the generations that never had the chance to meet Mises have come to know the way an economist thinks about science and life amidst personal tragedy. Sennholz and his wife and partner Mary produced the first Mises Festschrift, presented to Mises on February 20, 1956, long before Mises’ fame in the United States would grow. Sennholz alone took the initiative to do Mises this honor.

Sennholz acquired Mises’ papers for Grove City College, where they have been guarded as the treasures they are. He made Grove City stand out among American colleges as one of the few places where economic sense was taught during the heyday of Keynesian orthodoxy.

Sennholz did not only work to promote the Misesian school. He has been the great benefactor to all economists and scholars by being the translator and promoter of the work of Mises’ teacher, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. This was an act of great intellectual piety, since the market was not exactly clamoring for 100-year old books on interest-rate theory. And he did it all on the urging of Mises.

And though an outstanding theoretician, Sennholz placed a strong emphasis on the application of Austrian theory to the timing of business cycles, and to explaining the current state of affairs. This is, by itself, highly unusual in the economics profession. If you know anything about academic economists, you know that they are the last people you want to ask about the state of the economy. But Sennholz made it his job to explain the world around him, a trait which drew many to his thought.

Finally, I must add that Sennholz was never shy about insisting on the centrality of ethics in the study of economics. He decried the welfare state as confiscatory and immoral. He called inflation a form of theft. He identified government intervention as coercion contrary to the true spirit of cooperation. He did this at a time when saying such things was taboo in the profession. Here again, he was keeping alive the spirit of Mises, and the spirit of truth.

Nobody can ever gauge the full impact of a great intellectual in the development of culture. His influence spreads like waves in a lake; by the time the waves hit the shore, few are in a position to remember the source. But this much I’m sure of. We are all in Hans Sennholz’s debt far more than we know.