In Vienna, prior to, during, and just after World War I, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was attaining his full intellectual maturity. For a liberal like Mises these were truly lamentable years. The years from the early 1890s to 1920 constituted perhaps the most retrogressive watershed in the history of Western civilization. They were the years during which the grand liberal system of the Nineteenth Century was overthrown and transformed into Twentieth-Century statism. Saddened, but undaunted, Mises would spend the rest of his life championing the noble but forsaken cause of liberty and liberalism…. [From the text]