Like his contemporaries Raphael Lemkin (1900-59), who initiated the Genocide Convention, and Hersch Lauterpacht (1897-1960), who pioneered the legal concepts of the 'crime against humanity' and transnational human rights, Mises grew up in Lemberg (today the major Ukrainian city of Lviv/Lwów), on the border of the Russian Empire. Mises came from a modernising assimilated Jewish family, and strongly identified with what he saw as the civilising influence of the Habsburg Empire's German elite, whose culture was often depicted as 'fertilizer for an otherwise barren east'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 108