xii
Human
Action
Mises's masterwork, however, appeared in the midst of political and
personal crisis. After the Anscblzlss on March
12,
193
8,
Mises could
no longer travel to Austria. His apartment in Vienna had been
ransacked by National Socialists and his library and personal papers
c~nfiscated.~' By June 1940, German troops had virtually encircled
Switzerland, and, urged by his wife, Mises decided to leave Geneva
and emigrate to the United States.
"I
could no longer bear," he
explained in his Erinnmngen written shortly after his arrival in New
York City on August
4,
1940, "to live in a country that regarded
my presence as a political burden and danger to its security."26
From the outset, the book was cut off almost completely from
the German market, and its Swiss publisher would become one of
the countless economic casualties of war. Meanwhile, almost all
members of the former Afises-kieis had likewise left Austria and
emigrated to other countries.
In
their new, foreign, and uncertain
environment, they paid little or no attention to it. Thus, Nation-
alokonomie remained virtually unread." What should have been a
moment of immense satisfaction and even triumph, a moment
which might have brought about
a
shift away from the growing
~e~nesiadWalrasian-~arshallian
consensus, and even inocu-
lated the profession against the positivist onslaught of later dec-
ades, became for LI/Iises a moment of tragedy and likely the lowest
point in his career.
Nine more years would pass until, with the publication of
Human Action, Mises would reap some of the rewards that had
2
5.
Long thou ht to be lost, the papers were rediscovered in 1991 in
a
formerly
secret Soviet arckve in Moscow. The initial discoverers were two German
researchers
assGc-a:ed
-$iL$
a
Gem-,n
!-,boi
ufiion
fonn&&fi;
see
G6tz
xjr
and Susanne Hein, Daszentrale Staatsarcbiv in Moskau (Diisseldorf, Germany:
Hans-Blijckler-Stiftung,
1993). Following up on their workwere,two Austrian
historians Gerhard Jagschitz and Stefan
Karner,
Beuteakten aur Osterreicb:
Dm
Ostmeichbestand
im
Wchen "Sondm-archiv" Moskau (Graz, Austria: Ludwig
Boltzmann-Institut, 1996).
26. Ises's Erinnerclngen was published posthumously (Stuttgart, Germany:
Gustav Fischer, 1978),
p.
88; translated as Notes and Recollections.
27. Only two members ofthe
formerMises-fieisreviewed
the book, Hayek
(Economic Journal, April 1941) and Walter Sulzbach (Journal
of
Social
Philosophy andJurisprudence, October 1941). Greaves and McGee, Mises: An
Annotated Bibliography, list only two other reviews, one by Hans Honegger in
a
Swiss newspaper, and the other by Frank H. Knight (Economica, November
1941).