Henry Hazlitt strongly recommended this book for all students of the social sciences. It had a formative influence on his life. In fact, it is the book that taught him how to think.
And not only Hazlitt. William Stanley Jevons’s book was the seminal contribution that educated many generations of English and American scholars that crucial discipline of logic. It teaches the rules for thinking. Now, this was a subject that every student once had to take, and not in college but quite early in life, and certainly by high school.
No more. Today, it is widely assumed that there is no structure of thinking that is worth studying. And perhaps that explains why serious thinking is so rare. It is nothing short of astonishing that most people go all the way through school with no exposure to logic at all.
We’ve long looked for a good text to bring into print. Jevons, one of the architects of the Marginal Revolution, is a great choice.
To be sure, this book is not easy. It takes patience and discipline. It offers a great challenge to anyone. However, if you can go through the book and learn from it, you will have a massive advantage over colleagues, most of whom have never studied this area.
Does it make sense that an economics publishers would bring out a book on logic? Certainly it does from a Misesian point of view. Logic is the method of economic thinking. Without it, indeed, economic theory is not possible.
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Mises Institute, 2010
