Human Action: Scholar's Edition (LvMI)

by Ludwig von Mises

Overview

Human Action is the most important book on political economy you will ever own. It was (and remains) the most comprehensive, systematic, forthright, and powerful defense of the economics of liberty ever written. This is the Scholar's Edition: accept no substitute. You will treasure this volume.

The Scholars Edition is the original, unaltered treatise (originally published in 1949) that shaped a generation of Austrians and made possible the intellectual movement that is leading the global charge for free markets.

Made available exclusively through the Ludwig von Mises Institute, this edition, Mises's original, is the one to own.

Includes the 1954 index prepared under Mises's supervision, the most complete ever published, united here with the book for the first time. The introduction, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jeffrey Herbener, and Joseph Salerno — based on newly discovered archives — tells of the tragic and glorious history of this seminal work, and of its bright future as the manifesto of liberty.

Mises himself wrote the following by way of explanation of why he wrote the book:

"Economics does not allow any breaking up into special branches. It invariably deals with the interconnectedness of all phenomena of acting and economizing. All economic facts mutually condition one another. Each of the various economic problems must be dealt with in the frame of a comprehensive system assigning its due place and weight to every aspect of human wants and desires. All monographs remain fragmentary if not integrated into a systematic treatment of the whole body of social and economic relations.

"To provide such a comprehensive analysis is the task of my book Human Action, a Treatise on Economics. It is the consummation of lifelong studies and investigations, the precipitate of half a century of experience. I saw the forces operating which could not but annihilate the high civilization and prosperity of Europe. In writing my book, I was hoping to contribute to the endeavors of our most eminent contemporaries to prevent this country from following the path which leads to the abyss."

The Scholars Edition of Human Action is the definitive edition of this great work and foundation of every library of freedom.

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Product Details

BN ID:	2940013308909
Publisher:	Ludwig von Mises Institute
Publication date:	10/13/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1128
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

One of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig von Mises, in the course of a long and highly productive life, developed an integrated, deductive science of economics based on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act purposively to achieve desired goals. Even though his economic analysis itself was "value-free" — in the sense of being irrelevant to values held by economists — Mises concluded that the only viable economic policy for the human race was a policy of unrestricted laissez-faire, of free markets and the unhampered exercise of the right of private property, with government strictly limited to the defense of person and property within its territorial area.

Holding these views, and hewing to truth indomitably in the face of a century increasingly devoted to statism and collectivism, Mises became famous for his "intransigence" in insisting on a non-inflationary gold standard and on laissez-faire.

Effectively barred from any paid university post in Austria and later in the United States, Mises pursued his course gallantly. As the chief economic adviser to the Austrian government in the 1920s, Mises was single-handedly able to slow down Austrian inflation; and he developed his own "private seminar" which attracted the out­standing young economists, social scientists, and philosophers throughout Europe. As the founder of the "neo-Austrian School" of economics, Mises's business cycle theory, which blamed inflation and depressions on inflationary bank credit encouraged by Central Banks, was adopted by most younger economists in England in the early 1930s as the best explanation of the Great Depression.

Having fled the Nazis to the United States, Mises did some of his most important work here. In over two decades of teaching, he inspired an emerging Austrian School in the United States. The year after Mises died in 1973, his most distinguished follower, F.A. Hayek, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in elaborating Mises's business-cycle theory during the later 1920s and 1930s.

Editorial Reviews

It should become the leading text of everyone who believes in freedom, in individualism, and in the ability of a free-market economy not only to outdistance any government-planned system in the production of goods and services for the masses, but to promote and safeguard . . . those intellectual, cultural, and moral values upon which all civilization ultimately rests. -- Henry Hazlitt, Newsweek

Henry Hazlitt

Human Action says it all. In this towering masterwork, Mises makes the case for limited government and a free society, pointing out the inseparability between freedom and free enterprise -- that you can't have one without the other. -- William H. Peterson, adjunct scholar, Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C.

William H. Peterson