When Von Mises, the priest of the Austrian School and not the 9th of Holland, went to Economics at UBA

In June 1959, Ludwig von Mises, lawyer, economist and one of the leading figures of the Austrian School of Economics, held a series of six lectures at the Faculty of Economic Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires, in the building located on the corner from Córdoba and Junín, where it still operates today.

Von Mises had been invited to Argentina by an o think tank of libertarian ideas directed by Alberto Benegas Lynch (father).

“He is a brilliant expositor of the principles on which every free society is founded”Benegas Lynch said by way of introduction, according to news reports Clarion from June 2nd.

The story of how Von Mises arrived in Argentina had begun almost twenty years earlier. Paradoxically in that same faculty.

“There was a seminar on the Austrian School organized by Benegas Lynch, William Lesley Chapman, Carlos Luzzetti and José Santos Gollan (h.) – Benegas Lynch’s son, Alberto Benegas Lynch (h.) said several times -, and the four of them They discovered Gottfried Haberler’s book on the first floor of the faculty Prosperity and depression, where he explained Mises’ theory of the business cycle”.

According to Mariano Arana, economist and author of a recent fascinating story on the careers of Economics graduates in Argentina (Politicians, officials and academics: the university education of economists in Buenos Aires, Editorial Imago Mundi), ten years before Benegas Lynch ‘discovered’ Gottfried, in the first chairs of Political Economy at the FCE UBA (the degree in Economics did not yet exist) there had been ‘a triumph of marginalism’ in the UBA, school of thought economic that will influence the Austrians, through the reading of William Jevons, Carl Menger (father of the Austrians), Leon Walras, Vilfredo Pareto, Alfred Marshall, Irving Fischer, Karl Cassel. The course was entrusted to Roque Gondra and his assistant, a young and orthodox Raúl Prebisch.

The depression of the 1930s meant a crisis not only for countries but also for economic science, because many of the principles of Menger, Pareto, Walras and Marshall idealized around “individual selfishness and the spirit of profit” turned out to be insufficient when it came to explaining and remedying the brutal blow that capitalism would suffer with the collapse of the order that had increased world well-being. All this would reset economic theory but also the formalization of science, the role of economists and, ergo, the teaching of the degree in Economics in Argentina which will begin to be debated within the FCE UBA during the Peronist government, between the end of the 40s and the 50s.

In the midst of these movements, Benegas Lynch contacted Leonard Read, businessman and founder of the former think tank Libertarian, adherent to the ideas of Von Mises. To reach him, who was then teaching at New York University, Benegas Lynch went there to invite him to UBA. He arrived in 1959. Arana says the degree in Economics already existed. Chapman was the college’s principal.

Benegas Lynch Jr. once boasted that his father’s plan had been “re-float the liberal ideology in Argentina since from Alberdi to today the country was an intellectual desert”. And Margit Von Mises, Mises’ wife, remembered “that the country was willing to receive new ideas and my husband was willing to provide them.”

But was it like that?

First, in those years many economists came to the FCE UBA and the country. And not everyone thought the same way: Friedrich Hayek, John Hicks, Oscar Lange, Wasilly Leontief, Don Patinkin.

Second, the centrality in the FCE UBA in the late 1950s came through the economist Julio H. Olivera, who had also traveled to the United States and, being mathematically influenced by a mainstream contrary to Austrian principles, it would have given a strong imprint to the training of future economists.

Mises spoke in English in the Great Hall. Since the room was full, two connecting rooms were opened where the translation into Spanish took place. Olivera finally clarified “that out of modesty Von Mises” had not said that he was the only author of the publication that legitimized his hypothesis and that Strict equilibrium does not exist as such because there is no free mobility of factors at any time and place.. And that differential equations still allow us to find a balance. This is how La Prensa told it.

According to Benegas Lynch Jr., “Von Mises did not leave satisfied with the professors at UBA.” Many referred to the “Austrians” with a certain “contempt”.

President Javier Milei said this the other day “I always joke that if you go to FCE UBA and ask who Ludwig von Mises is, they will tell you he is the 9th of Holland and for others he is the best economist of all time together with Murray Rothbard”. Today at UBA, 100 years after Menger’s teaching, there is an Austrian economics course. It is really worth distinguishing von Mises from Van Basten, the former Dutch 9: von Mises arrived at UBA.