http://mises.org/podcasts/nation-state-and-economyMises wrote his first major book in the wreckage of the Habsburg collapse, the same year Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace—and a few months earlier. It is the most personal and the most political of his works, and the one where his later themes first appear.He begins with a question that has never stopped mattering: what is a nation? His answer is that a nation is a community of language, not of blood or soil—a position he defends against the race theorists of his day and follows wherever it leads, through the problem of territories with mixed populations, the politics of migration, and the roots of imperialism. He then turns to the war economy he had just lived through: the autarky and stockpiling, the inflation disguised as war finance, the state socialism that Germany and Austria adopted as an emergency measure and that so many were reluctant to give up. The closing parts take on socialism directly—its utopianism, its centralist and syndicalist forms, and its own imperial ambitions.Written by a liberal who had served at the front and watched his country dismembered, Nation, State, and Economy is both an economic analysis and an argument about why liberalism lost. Translated by Leland B. Yeager.enLudwig von MisesSerialnohttps://cdn.mises.org/images/2026-11/Nation-State-and-Economy_Mises_2400.jpghttp://mises.orgMises Institutemisesmedia@gmail.comhttp://mises.org/podcasts/nation-state-and-economy/prefaceLudwig von MisesWed, 04 Nov 2026 16:41:02 -0600154889Mises’s own framing, signed at Vienna in July 1919. He disclaims any attempt at a complete account, warning that no one standing in the middle of the battle can treat the questions of his time without anger or partiality. His aim is narrower: to point at what public discussion keeps missing.

]]>noPhilosophy and Methodology, World History1http://mises.org/podcasts/nation-state-and-economy/translators-introductionLeland B. YeagerWed, 04 Nov 2026 16:45:06 -0600154890Leland Yeager sets the book beside The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written the same year but a few months later. He traces what the two share—the recognition that nations prosper together rather than at each other’s expense—and supplies the historical background a modern listener needs: Königgrätz, Schwarzenberg, the suppression of 1848, and the Habsburg world Mises was writing from inside.

]]>noHistory of the Austrian School of Economics, War and Foreign Policy, World History2http://mises.org/podcasts/nation-state-and-economy/introductionLudwig von MisesWed, 04 Nov 2026 16:59:46 -0600154891Mises refuses the question of whether the war could have been avoided: the fact that it happened shows which forces were stronger. He rejects history written as a prosecutor’s brief, then turns to the German Empire forged at Königgrätz—a state of German princes rather than of the German people, which many of the best never reconciled themselves to.

]]>noPolitical Theory, War and Foreign Policy, World History3http://mises.org/podcasts/nation-state-and-economy/nation-speech-communityLudwig von MisesWed, 04 Nov 2026 17:17:56 -0600154892The book’s foundation. Mises argues that nation and nationality are modern concepts belonging to political individualism, and that to understand them you must start from the individual rather than the group. Neither residence nor citizenship makes a man German. What does is the speech community he belongs to—a position he presses to its limits, including the case of children raised by foster parents in another language.

]]>noPhilosophy and Methodology, Political Theory, World History4http://mises.org/podcasts/nation-state-and-economy/dialect-and-standard-languageLudwig von MisesWed, 04 Nov 2026 17:31:41 -0600154894How scattered tribal dialects were drawn together by trade, conquest and religion into standard languages. Mises’s striking illustration: a Low German speaker can assimilate toward German or toward Dutch, and nothing in linguistics or ancestry decides which—only political, economic, and social facts do.

]]>noMedia and Culture, Political Theory, World History5