The Influence and Significance of Human Action After 75 Years

Preface

The contributions to this volume range broadly over the disciplines of economics, epistemology, the philosophy of science, history, and political philosophy. The essays on economics alone touch on topics as diverse as money, uncertainty, business cycles, environmental policy, entrepreneurship, monopoly and competition, antitrust policy, economic calculation, and comparative economic systems. Based on these contributions, one might be tempted to characterize Human Action as a grand treatise on economics, encompassing aspects of auxiliary disciplines, but even this description would gravely underestimate its scope and importance. For Human Action is more than a book about economics broadly construed. It is a guide to civilized social life which elucidates the laws of reality that apply if human persons are to engage in peaceful and prosperous social cooperation under the division of labor. Indeed, Ludwig von Mises considered titling his treatise Social Cooperation.

For Mises, unlike most economists, economics is not merely an “analytical toolbox” for grading alternative economic policies or economic systems as more or less practical or efficient. Rather, economics is a body of substantive truths about the institutional foundations of human society. Thus, what is at stake in formulating a well-founded and coherent structure of economic theory is not an incremental change in GDP or “social welfare” but the fate of humanity. This unique view of economics accounts for Mises’s emphatic tone and what has been called his “intransigence” in defending laissez-faire capitalism as the only thinkable economic system consistent with the rational allocation of resources under specialization and the division of labor that is indispensable to human material and spiritual flourishing.

Mises summed up the importance of economics for human existence in the concluding passage of his great treatise:

The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral, intellectual, technological, and therapeutical achievements of the last centuries have been built. It rests with men whether they will make the proper use of the rich treasure with which this knowledge provides them or whether they will leave it unused. But if they fail to take the best advantage of it and disregard its teachings and warnings, they will not annul economics; they will stamp out society and the human race.

As the reader will soon discover, all the essays in this book are profoundly inspired by Mises’s vision of economics. It is not coincidental that their authors are closely associated with the Mises Institute, whose mission since its founding by Lew Rockwell in 1982 has been to promote research and education in Misesian economics. It is a testament to the resounding success of the Mises Institute in pursuing its mission that the scholars who contributed to this volume—who were both teachers and students at its educational events—span four academic generations.