Copyright Page
The Economic Point of View
Copyright © 1960 by the Institute for Humane Studies.
Introduction to the Second Edition
Copyright © 1976 by the Institute for Humane
Studies, Inc., Menlo Park, California
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
Dedication
B’EZRAS HASHEM
TO OUR PARENTS
Foreword by Ludwig von Mises
The inauguration of a systematic science of economics, an achievement of the social philosophy of the Enlightenment that also begot the doctrine of popular sovereignty, was a challenge to the powers that be. Economics shows that there prevails in the succession and interdependence of the market phenomena an inescapable regularity that man must take into full account if he wants to attain ends aimed at.
Introduction to the Second Edition
The first edition of Israel M. Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View was published in 1960. In the meantime, the dogmatic brand of positivism that advocated the banishment of all references to mental states from scientific explanations and their replacement by the “data of the senses” has been discredited.
Author’s Preface
The present essay is an attempt to explore with some thoroughness an extremely narrow area within the field of the history of economic thought. Although this area is narrow, it merits a scrutiny quite out of proportion to its extension, relating as it does to fundamental ideas around which the entire corpus of economic thought has revolved for some two centuries. It remains as true today as ever before that the direction taken by economic theory is in large measure determined by the “point of view” adopted by the economist as his special perspective.
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to the courtesy of the following institutions, associations, and publishers:
1. On Defining the Economic Point of View
. . . What does the economist economize? “’Tis love, ’tis love,” said the Duchess, “that makes the world go round.” “Somebody said,” whispered Alice, “that it’s done by everybody minding their own business.” “Ah well,” replied the Duchess, “it means much the same thing.” Not perhaps quite so nearly the same thing as Alice’s contemporaries thought.
2. The Science of Wealth and Welfare
This fatal word “material” is probably more responsible for the ignorant slanders on the “dismal science” than any other economic description . . .
Alec L. Macfie
Political Economy is a science in the same sense in which Astronomy, Dynamics, Chemistry, Physiology are sciences. Its subject-matter is different; it deals with the phenomena of wealth, while they deal with the phenomena of the physical universe.
J. E. Cairnes
3. The Science of Avarice; Getting the Most for the Least
In the past economists have often been attacked on the grounds that their theories only applied to selfish people; such attacks were brushed aside as absurd. But they were not absurd . . .
I. M. D. Little
4. Economics, the Market, and Society
The definition to which economic writers have yielded a more general assent than to any other . . . is “the science of exchanges.”
A. S. Bolles (1878)
. . . that definition of Political Economy which calls it the science of exchanges, is absurd.
Franklin H. Giddings (1887)
