Who was he: Hans Sennholz (February 3, 1922 - 23 June 2007), was a professor at Grove City College. His work is highly recommended by hard-money expert Joseph Salerno (amongst others) who has written several appreciations of his output.
Salerno believes that Sennholz himself clouded his free-market profile by writing so well on so many issues that he appeared facile. He was not, though.
Salerno sees this mistaken perspective applied to other great minds as well. "As Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, these two brilliant nineteenth-century French economists, who were also masters of economic rhetoric, wrote with such clarity and style that their work was misjudged by their British inferiors as shallow and superficial. Happily, their reputations as profound and insightful economic theorists and forerunners of Austrian economics have been finally restored by contemporary Austrian scholars."
For Salerno, this is not an issue. He places Sennholz at the very top of the free-market pantheon with scholars like Ludwig von Mises and FA Hayek.
In an appreciation, Salerno wrote of him: "I would like to highlight Sennholz's contributions to the rebirth of interest in Austrian monetary and business cycle theory and the continuing importance of his works today. Along with Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, Sennholz was one of a handful of academic economists to stand fast against the postwar tidal waves of Keynesian macroeconomics and Friedmanite monetarism that swept over American academia in the 1950's and 1960's and threatened to completely submerge sound monetary economics."
Background: Hans F. Sennholz, born in Brambauer, Germany, was an economist of the Austrian school of economics who studied under Ludwig von Mises. Sennholz served in the Luftwaffe in World War II, then took degrees at the universities of Marburg and Köln.
Sennholz traveled to the United States to study for a Ph.D. at New York University and had the distinction of being Ludwig von Mises's first Ph.D student in the United States. Dr. Sennholz taught at Grove City College from 1956–1992, and was also hired as department chair.
After he retired, Dr. Sennholz became president of the Foundation for Economic Education from 1992–1997. US libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul says his interest in economics began when he met Hans Sennholz.
Peter Boettke, Deputy Director of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy at George Mason University, was also a Sennholz student.