Nation, State, and Economy

Mises 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.