Ludwig von Mises

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen and first of all you, our distinguished friend Hazlitt.

When I look back on my life, what strikes me is that I have been on the whole a very lucky man—and, above all, lucky in my friends.

I have left the text of the first edition of this book practically unaltered. But I promised in the Preface that I would outline in an epilogue the changes I would make today if I were writing an entirely new book on the same subject. Here is that outline.

As thinking is primarily an activity, an art, the new book would probably not be called Thinking as a Science, but, perhaps, The Art of Thinking Scientifically, or, simply, The Art of Thinking.

There are basically only two ways in which economic life can be organized. The first is by the voluntary choice of families and individuals and by voluntary cooperation. This arrangement has come to be known as the free market. The other is by the orders of a dictator. This is a command economy. In its more extreme form, when an organized state expropriates the means of production, it is called socialism or communism. Economic life must be primarily organized by one system or the other.

If capitalism did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it—and its discovery would be rightly regarded as one of the great triumphs of the human mind. But as “capitalism” is merely a name for freedom in the economic sphere, the theme might be stated more broadly: The will to freedom can never be permanently stamped out.

The concept of Rights is in origin a legal concept. In fact, in most European languages the term for Law is identical with the term for Right. The Latin jus, the French droit, the Italian diritto, the Spanish derecho, the German Recht signify both the legal rule that binds a person and the legal right that every person claims as his own. These coincidences are no mere accident. Law and Right are correlative terms. They are two sides of the same coin.

Since at least as far back as Plato, many of the world’s great minds have devoted themselves to the problems of politics. But they have not come up with any answers that have satisfied more than a narrow and transient majority in some country here or there. Today there are about 150 national governments in the world; but no two operate on exactly the same principles.

Nineteenth-Century Theories