Keynes is one of the most overrated scholars of all time — merely a dabbler with a great talent for self-promotion. I had not previously known about the event related below in Don Boudreaux’s letter to The Wall Street Journal. Keynes dismissed von Mises’ great work The Theory of Money and Credit as “unoriginal” (which, even if true, wouldn’t demonstrate that Mises was mistaken in his analysis) even though, as he later admitted, his command of German was not good enough to allow him to comprehend Mises’ argument. Do serious scholars dismiss the work of others without first making sure they understand it? No.
Here is Don’s letter:
Editor, The Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10281
To the Editor:
Kudos to Mark Spitznagel for drawing attention to the important but neglected work of the late Ludwig von Mises (“The Man Who Predicted the Depression,” Nov. 7).
But while Mr. Spitznagel is correct that Keynesians ignored Mises 1912 book Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (and its 1934 English-language translation, The Theory of Money and Credit), Keynes himself did not ignore it – and therein lays a revealing tale. When Mises’s German-language book first appeared in 1912, Keynes reviewed it in the prestigious Economic Journal, dismissing it as being unoriginal.
Seems pretty damning, until we learn that Keynes himself, in his 1930 book Treatise on Money, confessed that “in German, I can only clearly understand what I already know – so that new ideas are apt to be veiled from me by the difficulties of the language.”
Keynes’s influential dismissal of Mises’s work was based not on anything as lofty as informed disagreement; it was based instead on incomprehension.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
