The Influence and Significance of Human Action after 75 Years

7

The Challenge of Praxeological Realism

JÖRG GUIDO HÜLSMANN

Professor Salerno has kindly invited me to recount the ongoing impact of Ludwig von Mises’s magnum opus on my own intellectual development. In what follows I will first describe how I encountered Mises’s ideas in the early 1990s. Then I will zoom in on Human Action and explain why it embodies the research paradigm of praxeological realism. Finally, I will present how I have tried to develop this paradigm in my own work.

I

The first time I read about Ludwig von Mises must have been in the summer of 1991. I was studying mechanical engineering, management, and economics at the Technical University of Berlin, as well as philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. My main field in economics was international and monetary economics. The classes were taught by Professor Hans Hermann Lechner. In his treatise on monetary policy, he had quoted Mises and Hayek (see Lechner 1987, 241, 245, 255), and in his classes, he occasionally stated that the history of economic thought was not a one-way street and that precious nuggets could be found in the older writings. I heeded the lesson. When a few years later I read Murray Rothbard’s (2006, ix, 438) opposition to the Whig theory of history, I remembered that I had already heard this criticism in a lecture hall in Berlin.

The first time I opened a copy of Human Action was probably in the late summer of 1992. By then I had come across Mises’s name a second time. I had spent the academic year 1991–92 in France, at Toulouse Business School. In those days, the school had only one full-time economics professor. His name was Claude Courtois. The good professor was very eager to coach the students who showed any interest in academic research, and there were always some students of this sort. Their parents wished to prepare them for a business career, but they did not care for marketing, finance, and human resources. They felt a calling for philosophy, economics, sociology, anthropology, history, and political science. Dr. Courtois was there to help them. He had created a curriculum designed to initiate them into research and teaching. Quite a few professors came out of his program. It was made for me.

In the second semester, we had to write a substantial research paper. Since I was interested in economic policy and much more libertarian minded than my French classmates (even though I was at the time no more than an open-minded social democrat), Dr. Courtois had me read Hayek’s 1952 book The Counter-revolution of Science, as well as a collection of articles by Murray Rothbard which had just appeared in a French translation (under the title Économistes et charlatans). This was my initiation into Austrian economics, but it did not turn me into an Austrian. I was much more eager to learn more about the German ordoliberals, the so-called Freiburg School of economics.

Then something unexpected happened. When I presented my project to the class, Dr. Courtois chided me for a distinct lack of clarity. What kind of research I was up to? “Do you want to do research like Mises or like Sombart?” Here was this name again, Mises, and I still had not read a single line from his pen (nor from Sombart’s, by the way). I had a hunch that I would turn out to be closer to Mises than to Sombart, and said so. My intuition in late 1992 was a premonition of things to come. Having now studied all of Mises’s books and quite a few of Sombart’s, I can vouch that, in economics, my hometown is Vienna, not Berlin.

Upon my return to Germany later in the summer of 1992, I had to write a master’s thesis. It was a hot summer, and I spent it mostly in the library and in front of my laptop. My work dealt with economic conceptions of power. That is when I came across Mises a third time, and I would then actually read a few pages in Human Action in which Mises dealt with the difference between contractual bonds and hegemonic bonds (see Mises 1998, 196–99). It was obvious that he was an eminently clear writer and deep thinker, but I did not have the time to study his treatise in any detail.

At the end of that year, I enrolled in doctoral studies in money and banking under the direction of Professor Lechner. Now there was time for in-depth reading, especially in the field of monetary economics. The first book on my shelf was Mises’s (1924) Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel. I thought that before turning to the present-day literature, it would be helpful to take a look at the state of monetary thought at the outset of World War I, in order to appreciate the progress that had been achieved since then. I opened the book at Christmas of 1992 and was in for a great surprise.

This old master excelled in clarity of expression, and he had dealt with a subject of immense importance—the nature, causes, and consequences of the subjective value of money. From my previous studies I knew that this topic had not made it into the standard texts in money and banking. Mises demonstrated that this omission had been a grave error. Because subjective value was at the heart of monetary exchange, money prices were not related rigidly. An x-percent increase of the money stock was not bound to produce a y-percent increase in the price level at all times and in all places, but it definitely entailed a price-level increase. There were laws of money, but these laws were ordinal laws, not cardinal ones.

Even more intriguing was the way Mises approached this topic. He did not posit some more or less plausible hypotheses about possible causal connections between money prices, the money stock, interest rates, exchange rates, and so on, and then present various statistics and whatever other evidence was available to support his contentions. Rather, he proceeded in a purely logical, step-by-step deduction. He started from first principles relating to the nature of money and the nature of human action, and eventually worked his way to monetary policy and banking policy.

Even though I understood immediately how very different this book was from the standard texts on money and banking, at the time I was too ignorant to fully appreciate its achievements. Some twenty-five years later, when I had come to a more mature understanding of the book and its historical significance, I would write that it “rebuilds classical monetary theory on a completely new and more solid foundation, thus awakening it out of the slumber into which it had sunken after 1844 and making it relevant again for political decision-making” (Hülsmann 2018a, 26). I did not close it before I had studied it from cover to cover and taken numerous notes. At the end I had become a great admirer of this old economist from Vienna. I had started to become a Misesian.

II

The next thing was to read as many books from Mises as I could get my hands on. One of these books was Nationalökonomie (Mises 1940), the German-language predecessor of Human Action. At the time there was no literature on the differences between the two books. I therefore focused my attention on what I believed to be the German original text, in order to sidestep any imprecisions that might have resulted from the translation. A few years later I understood my error.

One of the reasons for the perennial value of Human Action is that a lot of time went into the elaboration and presentation of its content. Mises worked on writing Nationalökonomie from 1934 to almost 1940. Of course, the preparation time was much longer, since large parts of the book relied on his previous research. But then he had the opportunity to revise this work, and, moreover, circumstances compelled him to do it in a foreign language.

The great disadvantage of writing in a foreign idiom is that you lose nuance and context. That is a big problem for the work of historians, who deal with the special and often unique circumstances of human action that prevailed there and then, but not elsewhere and at other times. But is it not a big problem for praxeology, which deals with universals—that is, with what holds true at all times and in all places. The great advantage of writing in a foreign idiom is that it becomes impossible to brush over any imprecision in thought with linguistic fireworks. Human Action is such a fine book not least of all because it is written in an impeccably simple and clear prose.

Studying Nationalökonomie allowed me to relearn economics from the bottom up. The book featured the deductive approach that I had already appreciated in The Theory of Money and Credit. But now there was so much more. Here appeared an entire system of thought dealing with two intricately related subjects: human action and the science of human action.

Mises is often portrayed as a fountainhead of modern libertarianism, and rightly so, but the emphasis of the book is elsewhere. He discussed economic policy only in the last parts of Nationalökonomie. The main body dealt with the foundations of the theory of human action, starting with epistemological questions and then continuing with an exposition of the universal features of human action, such as the laws of subjective value, the law of returns, and the principles of the division of labor. Before he even said the first word about the market economy, Mises stressed the fundamental importance of economic calculation.

I have no doubt that the main factor that drove his passion for economics was the possibility of applying these conceptions in practice. Economics was not a mere ivory-tower pastime for Mises. It was the foundation for rational public policies. But the novelty and force of the book was that he argued that public policies could be built on universal scientific laws of human action (praxeological laws) and that these laws could be identified and defined with the help of a priori reasoning.

In other words, Mises made the case for praxeological realism. For me, with my background in mechanical engineering, philosophy, and neoclassical economics, this is what made his book so intriguing. It was at odds with all the standard ways of thinking, but praxeological realism was not obviously absurd. It clearly was an intellectual challenge. And, to be sure, it also was a political challenge, at any rate in the eyes of those who are accustomed to justifying each and every policy with tidbits of scientific “research.” Let me therefore spell out these challenges in a bit more detail (see also Hoppe 2023).

III

Following Carl Menger (1883), Mises argued that there are exact economic laws. That is, there are relationships between causes and consequences that do not merely hold true here and there, being liable to change in the future, but that hold true at all times and in all places. They are universal and immutable. Going beyond Menger, Mises argued (1) that all economic laws are emanations of the nature of human action. And he also argued (2) that the way we come to know, to demonstrate, and to refute these laws is through pure reasoning.

The idea that there are universal relationships between cause and effect is a cornerstone of human existence. All tools, all agriculture, all industrial endeavors are built on them, and everybody takes them for granted. All airline and bus passengers assume (to the extent that they give the matter any thought at all) that the physical characteristics of the materials out of which their airplanes and buses are built are the same at all times and in all places. They assume that the effects of gravitational pull are similarly universal, as are the laws of free fall, the intercept theorem, Pythagoras’s theorem, and various other chemical, mechanical, and geometrical laws. Everybody is also ready to admit that no extended object can be red and green all over at the same time, that 7 + 5 = 12, and that various other arithmetic and spatial relations also hold at all times and in all places.

However, when it comes to economic and social policy, or to legal questions pertaining to the organization of society, the idea that such matters may be resolved with the help of universals seems to be not much more than an interesting hypothesis with no shred of evidence to back it up.

And indeed, universals cannot be demonstrated in economics with the procedures that are typically used to demonstrate them in the natural sciences—most notably with the help of laboratory experiments. The laboratory serves to study one particular relationship, such as gravitational pull, by eliminating or at least stabilizing the influence of all other relationships that might have an influence on the speed of a moving object. Once the relationship between masses and acceleration that we call “gravitational pull” is established, it is held to be true under all other conditions of time and place that fulfill the specific conditions of the experiment (altitude, temperature, air density, and so on). In principle, only one experiment, if impeccably executed, would be sufficient to establish a relationship that exists at all times and in all places under similar conditions.

Laboratory experiments are unavailable in the sphere of human action. Every action results from a combination of universal and contingent factors. It would therefore be necessary to eliminate the influence of the contingent factors through some sort of laboratory setup. But that is not possible. The human decisions at the heart of human action are value judgments which ponder the influence of all the prevailing circumstances, and these value judgments are contingent. They are the most important of all the contingent factors influencing human decisions, and they cannot be eliminated from the study of human action without eliminating human action itself.

Menger and Mises understood that laboratory experiments were not necessary when studying human action. Universal causal relationships could be demonstrated with the help of purely logical inferences from facts that were known to all human beings, facts relating to the very nature of human action. For example, it is common knowledge that human beings have the ability to make choices between alternatives, that such choices therefore involve a ranking of the alternatives, and that the rank of each alternative expresses its subjective value relative to that of the other alternatives. It is also common knowledge that human beings consider some goods to be composed of equally serviceable units. From this it logically follows that each unit in a larger overall stock (one apple in a stock of ten) has a lower rank than each unit in a smaller stock of the same good (one apple in a stock of nine). The reason is that, whereas all things that can be done with a stock of nine can also be done with a stock of ten, the stock of ten allows one extra thing to be done, and this thing must necessarily be less important than any of the things that would have been accomplished with any of the units of a stock of nine. For the first nine units are necessarily allocated to those nine things that the acting person considers to be the nine most important things. By the very logic of this state of affairs, therefore, the tenth thing is necessarily less important than any of the first nine. It follows that any unit in a stock of ten invariably has a lower rank (a lower subjective value) than any unit in a stock of nine. This is called the “law of diminishing marginal value.”

Like all scientific laws, it holds ceteris paribus. Various complications give rise to other and sometimes more complicated causal relationships. One example:

A man owns five units of commodity a and three units of commodity b. He attaches to the units of a the rank-orders 1, 2, 4, 7, and 8, to the units of b the rank-orders 3, 5, and 6. This means: If he must choose between two units of a and two units of b, he will prefer to lose two units of a rather than two units of b. But if he must choose between three units of a and two units of b, he will prefer to lose two units of b rather than three units of a. (Mises 1998, 120)

In economics, then, we are dealing with universal relationships between the causes and the consequences of human action. They spring from the nature of human action, from its inner logic. This is why Mises calls them “praxeological laws” and argues that they hold true a priori, meaning that their validity is independent of any concrete experience and of any historical situation. For example, the law of diminishing marginal value is true even if, in a concrete situation, there is no stock of equally serviceable units. In situations of this sort, the law would not apply, or instantiate, but it would still exist—just as the impossibility of any extended object being red and green all over at the same time holds true independently of the question whether a particular object has some red or some green color. The distinction between the existence and the instantiation of a universal relationship is a key idea of philosophical realism. Misesian praxeology is realist in this sense. It is praxeological realism.

Mises came to espouse praxeological realism rather reluctantly. He started off as a disciple of Carl Grünberg, an eminent champion of the German Historical School at the University of Vienna. Grünberg and the other historicist professors taught that there were no universal laws of economics. All causal relations in the sphere of human action were historically contingent and therefore bound up in constant change. The consequences that followed from a wheat tariff in Austria in the 1890s were therefore unlikely to be valid in the 1910s, or in Denmark in the 1950s, or in Belgium in the 1890s. Mises thoroughly studied the historicist hypotheses and methods, but then he encountered the writings of Carl Menger. The father of the Austrian School of economics taught that there were not only contingent causal relations, but also exact and universal ones called economic laws, which determined the values and prices of all economic goods. Menger argued that economic science revolved around the study of such universals, whereas the study of contingent facts and relations was the proper job of historians, not of economists. Mises came to conclude that Menger was right. He dedicated the rest of his life to developing the Austrian approach.

It was this decision that cost him his academic career. The tenets of the Austrian School have almost always been unpopular with the authorities who decide who gets hired as a taxpayer-funded professor. Indeed, if there are universal laws of cause and effect, then governments and political parties are not omnipotent. They must conform their decisions to an objective reality which they do not control. This can be a bitter pill to swallow for an ambitious governor or senator, and it can be a veritable stumbling block in an election campaign, in which one candidate tries to outbid the others with preposterous pledges. Mises has always upheld truth to power and thereby provided great service to humanity. However, he was not useful to the powerful and therefore had to spend his life on the margins of state-funded academia. In Human Action, he expressed this state of affairs with these words: “It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power. An economist can never be a favorite of autocrats and demagogues. With them he is always the mischief-maker, and the more they are inwardly convinced that his objections are well founded, the more they hate him” (Mises 1998, 67).

IV

This brings me to the question of how Mises impacted my own career. No servant is greater than his master (Jn 13:16), and this holds true in the present case. For the same reason that Mises’s ideas were unpalatable to the powers that be in his time, they are “unhelpful” to the rulers of our present day. Whoever serves this cause is unlikely to be called to the high grounds of state-funded economic science. He must be willing to dwell on the low grounds and to roam in the wilderness.

While the cards are stacked against any aspiring young economists who takes his inspiration from Mises rather than Sombart or Marx, as of this writing, it is still possible to make a living as a professional Austrian economist. In my case, this began in 1995, when I attended my first summer university in Auburn and met two great scholars who would quickly become my mentors: Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Barry Smith. In the same year, during a stint at the statistics department of the International Energy Agency, I also got in touch with Bertrand Lemennicier from the University of Paris, who eventually connected me with Pascal Salin. Then, in January 1997, Lew Rockwell commissioned me to write a Mises biography. A few months later I also obtained a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service for a postdoc in Paris with Professor Lemennicier, and another scholarship from the Humboldt Foundation for a postdoc in Buffalo with Professor Smith. About a year after my arrival in Buffalo, Lew Rockwell offered me a permanent position at the Mises Institute. The rest is history.

The work on the Mises biography afforded me the great opportunity to deepen my acquaintance with Mises. My plan was to present the evolution of his ideas in their context. Meanwhile I had become very familiar with his writings. Moreover, I could rely on two abundant archival sources from Moscow and Grove City College (a total of some fifteen thousand pages) which had not been studied systematically by any previous writer. But I also had to prop up my reading in history and in the history of thought, and this turned out to involve much more work than expected. The project eventually took more than ten years from start to finish. Happily, it opened new perspectives, not only on Mises and his ideas, but also on the evolution of economic science in the twentieth century (see Hülsmann 2007).

During the years that were mainly dedicated to the Mises biography, I also started a parallel research program of an entirely theoretical nature. Here I dealt with various problems that I had come to see in Mises’s conceptions. Mises had convinced me of the case for praxeological realism. He had demonstrated that economics was, at heart, a body of universal propositions which held true and could be known a priori. But while this demonstration was convincing in some of the most important cases (such as the law of diminishing marginal value and the law of returns) and therefore also convincing in general, it was not satisfactory in every case. I therefore undertook to revise these weaker arguments and come up with better solutions.

This endeavor may come as a surprise to those who think that praxeological research is strictly speaking impossible because praxeological laws hold true with “apodictic certainty” (see Mises 1998, 105, 117, 196). It would therefore seem that no additional reflection is necessary and no further discussion possible. The only thing left to do would be to learn and assimilate the unshakeable theorems defined by previous generations.

However, this view of apodicticity is mistaken. A proposition about cause and effect in the sphere of human action is apodictically certain to the extent that it follows from the nature of human action, because then by definition no exceptions are conceivable. In other words, a proposition or theorem is apodictically certain to the extent that it is universal, and cannot be thought to be other than universal, because it concerns the very nature of human action. But two fundamental questions remain: What is that nature, and what are the concrete praxeological relationships implied in it? These questions cannot be fully answered in one-line sentences. The nature of human action is not one-dimensional, but multifaceted. It involves purposeful behavior and the choice between different ends and different means, but also technical relationships and value relationships between means and ends. It involves a normative context. It involves the passage of time, the presence of ignorance and uncertainty, the use of property, and many other elements. Praxeological research is therefore possible and necessary. It is open-ended and fallible (see Smith 1996).

Ludwig von Mises (1998, 39) emphasized that the “starting point of praxeology is not a choice of axioms and a decision about methods of procedure, but reflection about the essence of action.” Of course, this is not limited to reflections about human action in general, but also concerns the various concrete features of action. Accordingly, a reflection about the nature of human error has led me to revise the traditional Austrian business cycle theory (Hülsmann 1998). Contemplation on the relationship between means and ends has led me to revise the theory of interest (Hülsmann 2002). Meditation on the relationship between private property and human action has led me to revise the standard theory of moral hazard (Hülsmann 2006). Rumination on the relationship between the different ways of using money has led me to revise the theory of the time structure of production (Hülsmann 2008a, 2009, 2011). Closer thought about various types of human knowledge has led me to give greater precision to Mises’s theory of risk and uncertainty (Hülsmann 2018b). Reflection on the normative context of human action has led me to revise the definition of inflation (Hülsmann 2008b), to outline a praxeology of financial markets (Hülsmann 2023), and to develop a praxeology of gratuitous goods (Hülsmann 2024).

V

Last but not least, contemplation on the nature of economic laws has led me to revise the epistemology of economics and argue that many economic laws are counterfactual laws. This work, too, was the result of a critical revision of the foundations that Ludwig von Mises laid in Human Action, and I consider it to be one of my most important contributions.

In the 1990s, when I first came in touch with the Austrian economics movement in the US, that movement had split into three distinct paradigms: the praxeological paradigm of Mises and Rothbard, the knowledge and information paradigm of Hayek and Israel Kirzner, and the radical uncertainty paradigm of G. L. S. Shackle and Ludwig Lachmann. Rothbard had criticized the last two and championed praxeology. I was ignorant of his famous 1992 lecture on the present state of Austrian economics (there was no internet in those days), but had argued somewhat along the same lines as Rothbard (1997) in my doctoral thesis. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who had read the thesis, therefore invited me to present my point of view in an article for the Review of Austrian Economics.

In “Knowledge, Judgment, and the Use of Property” (Hülsmann 1997), I criticized the Hayek-Kirzner approach and argued that there was no tendency for the market process to ever reach equilibrium by the sort of learning process that Kirzner had championed in his writings. Learning of this sort was bound to be accidental and contingent, I wrote. It was not a universal and necessary (praxeological) feature of the market process. The basic praxeological category of entrepreneurial action was not knowledge (or learning or information), but entrepreneurial judgment. Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein (2012) later spelled out the same idea with greater thoroughness and in much more detail.

But if there was no universal tendency for equilibrium to be reached, did this not invalidate much of economic theory? Kirzner thought so, and that is why he developed his learning theory. Lachmann and Shackle thought so as well, and that is why they came to reject the idea of universal economic laws. Mises did not think so. He thought that most economic theorems could be demonstrated without any reference to equilibrium. Only in very few cases was it necessary to build the demonstration on the imaginary construct of the “evenly rotating economy,” and he even argued that the use of such constructions was “the specific method of economics” (Mises 1998, 237).

My solution was different. I argued that economics can be more realistic than even Mises imagined. It does not need to rely on any imaginary constructions at all. The purpose of equilibrium analysis is to explain the differences between equilibrium and disequilibrium. This difference does not depend on whether equilibrium ever exists at all. Even if the real world were always in disequilibrium, this would not reduce the necessity and utility of comparing it to a counterfactual world in which it was in equilibrium (see Hülsmann 2000). I later generalized this conception and argued that not only equilibrium analysis but also many other praxeological theorems have such a counterfactual nature (see Hülsmann 2003, 2004).

In this strand of my work, as in virtually all other areas, I took Human Action as my point of departure. Although I have often criticized Mises, I stand squarely on his shoulders and consider his accomplishments with great thankfulness and admiration.

References

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Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. 2023. “On the Proper Study of Man: Reflections on Method.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 26, no. 4 (Winter): 325–55. https://qjae.mises.org/article/94208-on-the-proper-study-of-man-reflections-on-method.

Hülsmann, Jörg Guido. 1997. “Knowledge, Judgment, and the Use of Property.” Review of Austrian Economics 10, no. 1 (March): 23–48. https://cdn.mises.org/rae10_1_2.pdf.

———. 1998. “Toward a General Theory of Error Cycles.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 1, no. 4 (Winter): 1–23. https://mises.org/quarterly-journal-austrian-economics/toward-general-theory-error-cycles.

———. 2000. “A Realist Approach to Equilibrium Analysis.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 3, no. 4 (Winter): 3–51. https://mises.org/quarterly-journal-austrian-economics/realist-approach-equilibrium-analysis.

———. 2002. “A Theory of Interest.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 5, no. 4 (Winter): 77–110. https://mises.org/quarterly-journal-austrian-economics/theory-interest.

———. 2003. “Fact and Counterfactuals in Economic Law.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 1 (Winter): 57–102. https://mises.org/journal-libertarian-studies/facts-and-counterfactuals-economic-law.

———. 2004. “The A Priori Foundations of Property Economics.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 7, no. 4 (Winter): 41–68. https://mises.org/quarterly-journal-austrian-economics/priori-foundations-property-economics.

———. 2006. “The Political Economy of Moral Hazard.” Politická ekonomie 54 (1): 35–47. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286726224_The_political_economy_of_moral_hazard.

———. 2007. Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/book/mises-last-knight-liberalism.

———. 2008a. “Time Preference and Investment Expenditure.” Procesos de mercado: Revista europea de economía política 5, no. 2 (Winter): 313–33. https://www.procesosdemercado.com/index.php/inicio/article/view/306.

———. 2008b. The Ethics of Money Production. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/book/ethics-money-production.

———. 2009. “The Demand for Money and the Time-Structure of Production.” In Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, edited by Jörg Guido Hülsmann and Stephan Kinsella, 309–24. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/book/property-freedom-and-society-essays-honor-hans-hermann-hoppe.

———. 2011. “The Structure of Production Reconsidered.” GRANEM Working Paper No. 2011-09-034, Université d’Angers, France.

———. 2018a. “Mises’ Monetary Theory.” In Banking and Monetary Policy from the Perspective of Austrian Economics, edited by Annette Godart-van der Kroon and Patrik Vonlanthen, 25–48. Berlin: Springer.

———. 2018b. “The Myth of the Risk Premium.” In The Economic Theory of Costs: Foundations and New Directions, edited by Matthew McCaffrey, 133–46. London: Routledge.

———. 2023. “Financial Markets and the Production of Law.” In Money and the Market Process. Vol. 1 of The Emergence of a Tradition: Essays in Honor of Jesús Huerta de Soto, edited by David Howden and Philipp Bagus, 191–207. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

———. 2024. Abundance, Generosity, and the State: An Inquiry into Economic Principles. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/book/abundance-generosity-and-state-inquiry-economic-principles.

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———. 1998. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Scholar’s ed. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/book/human-action.

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Smith, Barry. 1996. “In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring): 179–92.