Jörg Guido Hülsmann

Jörg Guido Hülsmann (born 18 May 1966) is a German-born economist who studies issues related to money, banking, monetary policy, macroeconomics, and financial markets. Hülsmann is professor of economics at the University of Angers’ School of Law, Economics, and Management.

He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, a corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute. He is a vice-president of the international Property and Freedom Society, a board member of the Association des économistes catholiques in France, and a scientific board member of the Hayek-Gesellschaft in Germany, of the Austrian Institute of Economics and Social Philosophy, and of the International Academy for Philosophy in Liechtenstein. Hülsmann has been the inaugural laureate of the international Franz Čuhel Prize for Excellence in Economic Education.

Economists such as Eugen-Maria Schulak and Herbert Unterköfler consider him to be one of the most important contemporary Austrian economists in Europe, next to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Jesús Huerta de Soto. In the wider heterodox-economics community striving for pluralism in economics he is regarded as a leading expert and world-renowned speaker. He has been interviewed in various media outlets all throughout Europe.

Life
Hülsmann went to high school in a town with "the highest communist voter percentage in all of Western Germany" and started public speaking at the age of 15. After mandatory military service, he went on to study industrial engineering (Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen) at the Technical University of Berlin, from 1986 to 1992. In the 1991–92 academic year, he participated in an exchange program with Toulouse Business School in France. There he wrote a thesis comparing the neo-marxist regulation school to the ordo-liberal Freiburg School. He also started studying the writings of the Austrian School. After the year in Toulouse, he returned to Berlin for doctoral studies under Hans-Hermann Lechner and obtained his PhD in economics in 1996. In January 1997, Lew Rockwell commissioned Hülsmann to write a Mises biography, a project that he would eventually complete in 2007. In 2004, he was appointed to a full professorship at the University of Angers.

Academic authorship
Hülsmann is the author of eight books, has edited or co-edited six other books, and published numerous journal articles and book chapters. His writings have been translated into twenty languages.

His 2008 book The Ethics of Money Production has been translated into German, French, Italian, Romanian, Polish, Chinese, Persian, Spanish, and Turkish. His 2007 book Mises – The Last Knight of Liberalism has been translated into Russian, Chinese, and Polish. Both books received numerous reviews and made it into Barron's recommended reading lists.

The Last Knight of Liberalism is the only full-blown biography of Ludwig von Mises and Hülsmann’s most-cited publication. It received a slating from Bruce Caldwell, while the other reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. Economic historian Robert Higgs praised it as "a magnificent scholarly achievement." In a lengthy review, the German national newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, called it "a literary event" and considered the work to "set standards" of biographical work. In September 2016, the Renmin University of China organized a full-day conference around the Chinese edition of the book.

In his 2024 book Abundance, Generosity, and the State, he studies the different ways through which economic goods are gratuitously provided and received. Philosopher David Gordon praised the book with these words: "It is rare to encounter a book that has the potential to reshape the way we look at economics, but Guido Hülsmann has done exactly that in Abundance, Generosity, and the State. Hülsmann is one of the leading theorists of the Austrian School, but he has always looked at issues in an original way, and that quality is manifested 'abundantly' in this outstanding book."

He has also become known as an economist who correctly anticipated the financial crisis of 2001; as a staunch critic of fractional-reserve banking; as a critic of the time-preference theory of interest; for his "reconsideration" of Austrian Capital Theory, opening new perspectives on the venerable Cambridge capital controversy; and as a proponent of the idea that economic laws are counterfactual a priori laws, rather than empirical regularities.

Teaching
Hülsmann directs an English-language master’s program in Law and Finance, and co-directs a double-major bachelor program in Law and Economics (in French) at the University of Angers.

He is also a frequent guest professor at Grove City College, and he has taught at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, (Romania), at Loyola University New Orleans, at CEVRO Institute in Prague (Czech Republic), at the King Juan Carlos University in Madrid (Spain), at ISM University of Management and Economics in Vilnius (Lithuania), and various other academic institutions.

Journalism
Hülsmann has written for various press outlets in Europe, for example, for national magazines such as Schweizer Monat, La Tribune, Die Zeit, and Der Standard, and for business magazines such as Wirtschaftswoche. For several years, he has authored a monthly column for the German libertarian magazine, eigentümlich frei.

Translations
Hülsmann has translated or co-translated Murray N. Rothbard’s books The Ethics of Liberty and What Has Government Done to Our Money?, Ralph Raico’s Die Partei der Freiheit and Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy, as well as Gustave de Molinari's De la production de la sécurité into German.