This talk was delivered at the Boston Mises Circle on October 1, 2016.

Last week marked the 135th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, and that's an appropriate moment to revisit Guido Hulsmann's brilliant biography of this great man, Mises: Last Knight of Liberalism. I commend this book to you, incidentally, not simply for its profile of a seminal figure, but also as an outstanding work of intellectual history that incidentally offers the reader a graduate course in the history of economic thought.

As I reread the concluding sections, I was struck by the difference in temperament between Mises and Murray N. Rothbard, his great seminar student for more than 10 years, at least in terms of their outlooks on our prospects. Murray became known for his long-term optimism. Mises, not so much.

Over the course of the 1950s, for example, George Reisman, one of four students to earn his Ph.D. under Mises, thought he was seeing progress: more and more people he encountered seemed sympathetic to the cause of free markets. Mises was less sanguine: Reisman, he said, was a young man in the process of meeting existing supporters of free enterprise. There was no growth occurring.

In fact, Mises went so far as to compare his own writings to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which would be found by someone a thousand years in the future.

Mises did not anticipate that his friend F.A. Hayek would win the Nobel Prize for his work on Misesian business cycle theory. Much less could he have imagined that a full-fledged Mises Institute, with its scholarly conferences and publications, week-long student immersion programs, and consistent and diverse forms of outreach to the general public, would one day flourish.

One difficulty evident in Mises's day was that supporters of the free market had by and large signed on with the emerging "conservative movement," where by process of elimination they thought they belonged.

There had been neither a conservative nor a libertarian movement before World War II. What we call the Old Right was a series of individual writers and thinkers, and the occasional periodical. The America First Committee was a movement, to be sure, and a great one, but it dissolved on December 8, 1941.

Within six years of Mises's arrival in the United States in 1949, the cause of laissez-faire was coming to be associated with the broader movement called conservatism. Remnants of the Old Right persisted after World War II, but before long they had become a distinct minority within a conservative movement that began to emerge with the creation of National Review in 1955. Murray tells the story in his posthumous book The Betrayal of the American Right, which is at once history and memoir.