I wonder if there is any kind of common advice guidance counselors give to kids that want to write tomes — the really thick books that everyone references but no one reads.
Case in point, economist Guido Hülsmann recently had his 1000 page masterpiece published this month. It covers the life and times of Ludwig von Mises, an economist whose wiki entry hardly does him justice.
Incidentally enough, I met Hülsmann in the summer of 2004, the dog days of August to be exact. I was attending an economics seminar in the quite countryside of Auburn, Alabama.
The first real encounter actually involved me giving him a reverse bearhug, preventing him from running away. While I struggled to subdue the energetic German, several other economists-in-training grabbed one of those orange water coolers that dot the sidelines of sporting events and doused him with a cold shower (Daniel D’Amico of GMU was another one of the culprits).
That’s certainly one way to become acquainted.
Later that evening I bumped into him at a local bar whereupon he hid any visible signs of animosity and shared stories over the finest imported beers (Heineken I think). A friend of mine that works at the parent Institute hosting the seminar mentioned that Hülsmann had just capped off the finishing touches on the first real biography of Mises. So, quite naturally I asked Hülsmann what it was like tackling such a monumental task.
He looked at me and said he was relieved it was over, due to the arduous work involved.
You see, while he his research activities had been funded by various donors, he was a one-man army tackling a intercontinental subject matter that most contemporaries would have several other researchers assisting with. In fact, if you check out the acknowledgment section of the book, you will see the numerous experts that had to be contacted throughout the globe, to effectively perform this exhaustive and original exposition. And for the most part, he did it alone.
Did I mention that there were only two people really qualified for the job? (You basically had to be a professional economist fluent in the tongues of Mises, not the least of which is German). So it was either him or Hans Hoppe and Hoppe was very busy with other projects.
Which brings me to a friend of mine, B.K. Marcus, who is acknowledged for his services in Hülsmann’s opus.
About a year later, around the same time I was writing my first piece on the FCC, I was introduced to a polymath, a genuine autodidact through attorney Stephan Kinsella. It turns out that this fellow traveler was in the middle of proof reading and editing Hülsmann’s tome — a full-time job in and of itself.
Anyways, over the following weeks and months we exchanged messages over IM, some of which pertained to the laborious task at hand. He mentioned that there were various pieces of information that unfortunately stood the test of time. For instance, in describing the collegiate culture Mises grew up in, Hülsmann notes:
Student life was generally organized through fraternities, which tended to segregate based on place of origin. This provided newcomers to the capital city with a network of their countrymen for mutual support; it also introduced them to established former members who could later be helpful in finding suitable employment. But the fraternities often degenerated into associations dedicated to excessive collective alcohol consumption, and tended to glorify violence and a militaristic lifestyle, with variants of a half-baked nationalistic ideology. (p. 65)
And based on my own first-hand experience with modern fraternities, these observations do not seem to have faded over the past century.
A mobius strip
In many ways, the debut of the book has completed a circle started three years ago. At that time I was juggling two different graduate fields, neither of which truly captivated me. One I finished, the other I put on hold.
However, I also befriended a number of the students and kept in touch with several of them, including four others who were the same age as me. Two of them are now finishing PhDs in economics (one at U of West Virginia, the other at GMU), one is getting a PhD in political science at U of Colorado at Boulder and the other is finishing up a PhD in history at UC Riverside. And all of them are passionate about their concentrations (three of them are even partial towards the Austrian School).
So, should someone call Vegas to find out the odds on one of them writing a tome, or has the interweb ended the age of really thick books?
[Note: Picture #1 takes place just after Hülsmann got soaked. #2, Hülsmann is sitting to my left as is Andrew Neumann who is at the U of West Virginia. The guy in front of me is David Veksler, webmaster of Mises.org and fellow Aggie. #3 was just an excuse to make me look popular]
See also:
Mises University: Reduxed and Remixed
Breaking Bad Habits A Century Later
The Last Knight of Liberalism (PDF)