This is a “new” book by Ludwig von Mises, the first of a series of lecture transcripts drawn from careful notes taken by Bettina Bien Greaves in the summer of 1951. It features Mises in a role in which we do not usually find him, not as a writer but as a speaker of enormous erudition and power.
There are nine lectures in this book: Economics and its Opponents; Pseudo-Science and Historical Understanding; Acting Man and Economics; Marxism, Socialism, and Pseudo-Science; Capitalism and Human Progress; Money and Inflation; The Gold Standard: Its Importance and Restoration; Money, Credit, and the Business Cycle; and The Business Cycle and Beyond.
We find Mises commenting on matters one usually doesn’t find in his others books, such as the impact that Plato had on the classical world, the place of Rousseau in history, the role of liberalism on the Continent as versus England, the impact of Poincare and Einstein, as well as passing comments on everything from banking debates of the 19th century as well as the role of ideology in modern life.
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Ludwig von Mises was the acknowledged leader of the Austrian school of economic thought, a prodigious originator in economic theory, and a prolific author. Mises’s writings and lectures encompassed economic theory, history, epistemology, government, and political philosophy. His contributions to economic theory include important clarifications on the quantity theory of money, the theory of the trade cycle, the integration of monetary theory with economic theory in general, and a demonstration that socialism must fail because it cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. Mises was the first scholar to recognize that economics is part of a larger science in human action, a science that he called praxeology.