John Maynard Keynes was wrong about most things, but he was absolutely correct when he stated that “practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” We might say this about most “elites” in governments today. Even those who have never seriously studied economics are nonetheless greatly influenced by the books and ideas of economists from decades past. This is true of most everyone whether they know it or not. The battle of ideas is waged in the pages of books and journals, but it doesn’t just stay in those pages. The ideas filter out into the public through newspapers, magazines, websites, podcasts, and other mass media.
Those ideas don’t appear out of nowhere, however. Human beings must create them through a process of discovery and creativity. The ideas must then somehow be communicated to others. This process, when done right, requires serious work from scholars and scientists, the best of whom wage intellectual battles with rigor, precision, and honesty.
Few intellectuals have fit this ideal better than the economist Ludwig von Mises, whose magnum opus, Human Action, turns seventy-five years old in 2024. After so many decades, Human Action remains a testament to Mises’s importance in the battle of ideas and in both preserving and advancing the study of sound economics.
It is important to remember that when Human Action first appeared in 1949, it was released into a world where socialism and third-way interventionism were absolutely ascendant among the academic elite.
Mises wrote it anyway. Human Action, however, has never been just an expression of various opinions about the state of the world. Rather, Mises provides a scientific foundation to the old liberal cause of freedom and free markets. It is rigorous, insistent, thorough, and comprehensive. As Lew Rockwell wrote on its fiftieth anniversary in 1999, Human Action was not “a polite suggestion that the world take another look at the merits of free enterprise. No, it was a seamless and uncompromising statement of theoretical purity that was completely at odds with the prevailing view. Even more than that, Mises dared to do what was completely unfashionable then and now, which is to build a complete system of thought from the ground up.” “From the first page to the last,” Rockwell added, “it contains not a word or phrase designed to appeal to the biases of the world around him. Instead, he sought to make a case that would transcend his generation.”
In this issue of The Misesian we celebrate seventy-five years of Human Action. As you will see in the next pages, many of our top scholars examine the legacy of Human Action and find it continues to inspire new generations of economists, scholars, and students. In fact, in the decades since it was published, Mises’s reputation has only grown. After all, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mises was proven right about socialism.
Yet, as Joseph Salerno also explains, third-way interventionism remains as popular and dangerous as ever. Fortunately, Human Action provides the tools we need to dismantle the ideology of this interventionist “mixed economy.”
In the spirit of Mises the man, we don’t think it’s enough to bemoan the errors of our age. We believe we must also fight the battle of ideas through rigor and scholarship while training up a new generation of teachers and scholars to continue the battle for years to come.
