Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
By Ludwig Mises
IT GIVES me great satisfaction to see this book, handsomely printed by a distinguished publishing house, appear in its third revised edition. Two terminological remarks may be in order. First, I employ the term “liberal” in the sense attached to it everywhere in the nineteenth century and still today in the countries of continental Europe. This usage is imperative because there is simply no other term available to signify the great political and intellectual movement that substituted free enterprise and the market economy for the precapitalistic methods of production; constitutional representative government for the absolutism of kings or oligarchies; and freedom of all individuals for slavery, serfdom, and other forms of bondage…. [From the Forward to the Third Edition]
First Pub. Date
1949
Publisher
Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education
Pub. Date
1998
Comments
Printed 1998. 4th revised edition. Foreword by Bettina Bien Greaves.
Copyright
The text of this edition is under copyright. Picture of Ludwig von Mises: file photo, Liberty Fund, Inc.
- Foreword to Fourth Edition, by Bettina Bien Greaves
- Foreword to the Third Edition
- Introduction
- Part 1, Chapter I. Acting man
- Part 1, Chapter II. The epistemological problems of the sciences of human action
- Part 1, Chapter III. Economics and the revolt against reason
- Part 1, Chapter IV. A first analysis of the category of action
- Part 1, Chapter V. Time
- Part 1, Chapter VI. Uncertainty
- Part 1, Chapter VII. Action within the world
- Part 2, Chapter VIII. Human society
- Part 2, Chapter IX. The role of ideas
- Part 2, Chapter X. Exchange within society
- Part 3, Chapter XI. Valuation without calculation
- Part 3, Chapter XII. The sphere of economic calculation
- Part 3, Chapter XIII. Monetary calculation as a tool of action
- Part 4, Chapter XIV. The scope and method of catallactics
- Part 4, Chapter XV. The market
- Part 4, Chapter XVI. Prices
- Part 4, Chapter XVII. Indirect exchange
- Part 4, Chapter XVIII. Action in the passing of time
- Part 4, Chapter XIX. Interest
- Part 4, Chapter XX. Interest, credit expansion, and the trade cycle
- Part 4, Chapter XXI. Work and wages
- Part 4, Chapter XXII. The nonhuman original factors of production
- Part 4, Chapter XXIII. The data of the market
- Part 4, Chapter XXIV. Harmony and conflict of interests
- Part 5, Chapter XXV. The imaginary construction of a socialist society
- Part 5, Chapter XXVI. The impossibility of economic calculation under socialism
- Part 6, Chapter XXVII. The government and the market
- Part 6, Chapter XXVIII. Interference by taxation
- Part 6, Chapter XXIX. Restriction of production
- Part 6, Chapter XXX. Interference with the structure of prices
- Part 6, Chapter XXXI. Currency and credit manipulation
- Part 6, Chapter XXXII. Confiscation and redistribution
- Part 6, Chapter XXXIII. Syndicalism and corporativism
- Part 6, Chapter XXXIV. The economics of war
- Part 6, Chapter XXXV. The welfare principle versus the market principle
- Part 6, Chapter XXXVI. The crisis of interventionism
- Part 7, Chapter XXXVII. The nondescript character of economics
- Part 7, Chapter XXXVIII. The place of economics in learning
- Part 7, Chapter XXXIX. Economics and the essential problems of human existence
FOREWORD TO THE THIRD EDITION
IT GIVES me great satisfaction to see this book, handsomely printed by a distinguished publishing house, appear in its third revised edition.
Theory and History (New Haven, 1957, pp. 264-274) the term “thymology,” and I used this term also in my recently published essay
The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (Princeton, 1962). However, my suggestion was not meant to be retroactive and to alter the use of the term “psychology” in books previously published, and so I continue in this new edition to use the term “psychology” in the same way I used it in the first edition.
Human Action have come out: an Italian translation by Mr. Tullio Bagiotti, Professor at the Università Bocconi in Milano, under the title
L’Azione Umana, Trattato di economia, published by the Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese in 1959; and a Spanish-language translation by Mr. Joaquin Reig Albiol under the title
La Acción Humana (Tratado de Economia), published in two volumes by Fundación Ignacio Villalonga in Valencia (Spain) in 1960.
New York
March, 1966
praxeology was first used in 1890 by Espinas. Cf. his article “Les Origines de la technologie,”
Revue Philosophique, XVth year, XXX, 114-115, and his book published in Paris in 1897, with the same title.
Catallactics or the Science of Exchanges was first used by Whately. Cf. his book
Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (London, 1831), p. 6
Part 1, Chapters I-VII.