Prof. Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe noted Mises’s philosophical rigor:
I started out in my intellectual development as a left-winger. That was a time of the Vietnam War and the student protests all around the United States and also in Europe. And this generation, of course, is often blamed for the successive leftward turn of Germany and the march through the institutions that was recommended by the Italian commie Gramsci. And that still continues to this day, but with some signs appearing on the horizon that the end of this rope may be near.
This year is also the 50th anniversary of my receiving my PhD. By 1974, I was still somewhat of a left-winger but already considerably more moderate. My dissertation had nothing whatsoever to do with political philosophy. It was a critique of empiricism, in particular the philosophy of David Hume, from a rationalistic point of view.
There’s not much to say about this now except that this study created in me some fundamental intellectual predisposition that would later immediately attract me to Mises’s work as an outstanding example of rationalist thought, in contrast to the logical empiricists that were gathered around the famous Vienna School, or the Vienna Circle, with whom Mises was, of course, intimately familiar. Meanwhile, successively and systematically expanding my readings beyond mostly leftist literature, I moved increasingly more rightward, conservative, and promarket. I encountered first Milton Friedman, who at the time was frequently mentioned in the German newspapers and magazines as an intellectual big shot in the United States and as the most famous champion of American capitalism, and became some vaguely defined “free marketeer.”
But as a philosophical rationalist, I also recognized early on the various inconsistencies and logical gaps in Friedman’s arguments. From Friedman, I found my way to Hayek, who actually lived and taught in Germany at the time but, curiously, was mentioned less frequently than Friedman, for instance, despite having just been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974.
From there, I was on to Mises. Of course, I had heard his name by now. Interestingly, while he was never mentioned in West German economic textbooks, his name figured prominently in commie East Germany.
Still, until the late 1970s, I had not actually read anything by Mises. This changed only when I began serious work on my habilitation thesis. I found a reference in a footnote in one of Hayek’s writings to Mises as one of his mentors but as representing a different strand of the Austrian School than Hayek’s own.
He mentioned, in particular, Mises’s Human Action as an outstanding example of this different tradition. In Hayek’s view, this hyper-rationalistic strand of economics, or what Mises then called praxeology (which was a term I had never heard before), was some sort of discipline offering and made up of aprioristic propositions. Now, that sounded like exactly what I was looking for.
Human Action, then, was the very first book of Mises’s that I read. I devoured the whole volume in just two or three days. In my view, it was in a different league than anything offered by Friedman and Hayek. And it turned me into a radical free marketeer.
Dr. Bob Murphy recalled how Mises and his works became more insightful as Murphy grew as a scholar:
I’ve read Human Action cover to cover at least seven times, I think, and every time I come back to it I’m just more blown away by how smart Mises is. It’s kind of like the Mark Twain quote: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
It’s the same kind of thing here. Since Mises was already in the ground, there’s no way he kept learning more economics as I got older. And so it was clearly the fact that I learned more stuff.
But it’s not just economics that Mises knew. He was very conversant with quantum physics. He has little footnotes about how quantum uncertainty does not change the results of the discussion. I mean, it’s astonishing what a Renaissance man he was and how well-read he was. And you notice that just if you go through and read Human Action.
I’ve noticed online that sometimes self-described Austrian fans will get into arguments with people and it’s clear they don’t have a great grounding in economics. Their conclusions are right. They don’t trust the state. They know private property is great. But in terms of just battling some interventionist on some matter of economic theory, some of them need more grounding.
So I would say if you really want to call yourself an Austrian, at some point you have to buckle down and read Human Action, and I think you’re going to find it’s amazing. It literally changed my life. It’s not just about economics. It’s a whole worldview.
Superficially, yes, anybody who’s conversant with the Austrian School is going to know these topics. But again, with successive readings, the more I went back and the more I learned about other fields and that I became more knowledgeable just about the world of ideas, the more astonished I was when I went back and reread what Mises had published in 1949.
Mises is a much better commentary on AI consciousness and other contemporary philosophical issues than 99 percent of what you’re going to see nowadays. So that’s what I’m saying. It’s astonishing if you go back and look at this great work.
Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo explained how Human Action provides essential insights into economic history:
I first discovered Austrian economics during my first semester in college, when I took principles of economics. There was a bookshelf in the classroom, and it had all the back issues of The Freeman magazine in it. It was like a miracle. So I started flipping through the old issues, and I was reading Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, William H. Hutt, Israel Kirzner, in all these old Freeman articles.
My professor also knew about the early public choice literature, and I thought it was really interesting. So, I ended up going to graduate school at Virginia Polytechnic Institute because that’s where James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock were.
In the graduate program’s microeconomics class, I was assigned two books. One of them was Human Action. I’ve had my copy for forty-eight years. All this influenced my research. Some of my early publications were in the International Review of Law and Economics in 1985.
I was studying antitrust at the time. And, of course, when I was teaching, I was teaching the Austrian theory of competition, not the perfect competition theory of competition. And I noticed that every single textbook said that in the late nineteenth century, there was a rampant monopolization of American industry, and that justified the antitrust laws.
I was the very first person to dig up the actual statistics on such things as production and prices of the industries that were accused of being monopolies by the Senate and the House of Representatives in the late 1880s before they passed the Sherman Act. And I published this article showing that instead of output restriction, there was massive expansion. These industries were the fastest-growing and most productive industries in America at the time, which is why they were being picked on by their less successful rivals, who got the politicians to pass a law that would hamper them. The same with prices. They dropped prices faster than the CPI dropped for ten years prior to the Sherman Act and ten years after the Sherman Act. The only reason I was the first one to do that is that no one else had asked this question from an Austrian perspective ever before.
So if you have Austrian economics and libertarian theory in your educational background, you look at history very differently.
Dr. Mark Thornton examined how Human Action provides insights far beyond the economics classroom:
In the very early days of my graduate studies across the street at Auburn, a Human Action reading group was set up. I had never read Human Action. I did not even own a copy of Human Action at the time. I was very much interested in Austrian economics, but I was very much a novice. And the reading group proceeded. We would read the first hundred pages and then get together and discuss it.
In the 1990s, I taught a course at Auburn University called Austrian Economics. It was an advanced undergraduate course. I had several doctoral students in the class. It was wonderful.
It was a big challenge for me to keep up with the reading in the course and to be able to really translate the whole thing for the students. And the most interesting response I got in terms of teaching the course is that the average run-of-the-mill Auburn economics major would come up to me and say, “You know, I really still don’t understand what this Austrian economics stuff is, but I understand all my other courses a lot better.” That was very interesting to me.
Prior to the publication of Human Action, American economics, and really worldwide economics, was dominated by a pluralism where there were many competing ideas, approaches, and methodologies. Austrian economics was but one small element within that pluralism, which has since become sort of an overall hegemony of a single approach. But prior to Human Action, prior to World War II, there were multiple processes and ideas.
Mises’s Human Action brought many aspects of that pluralism into question. And as a matter of fact, it was just like the way the neo-Veblenian strands of economic thought are trying to question aspects of Austrian economics today with things like behavioral economics, psychology, marketing for perfections, and so forth.
It was Mises in Human Action that first presented a pure process. Much of the discussion regarding methodology in the book was really Mises critiquing the mistakes within that pluralism, the psychological issues and various social strands of the issues.
So I think there’s a good case to be made that Mises’s Human Action was read by many people. I think people in the real world probably understood the book much better.
Entrepreneurs, for example, probably understood the book much better than PhD economists or university students without any experience in the world. And as a result, many, many people dismissed Human Action or stopped reading it because of their lack of familiarity with the material in the opening sections, which I now consider to be the most vital and most brilliant parts of the book.
Guido Hülsmann noted that one of the most memorable aspects of Human Action is its precision and clarity:
It is always right and just to praise the achievements of Ludwig von Mises, and in particular, the publication of Human Action seventy-five years ago. Like most of us, I never met Ludwig von Mises in person. I first encountered his ideas some twenty years after his passing.
It was obvious to me then that he was an eminently clear writer and a deep thinker. The first book on my shelf was Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit, the German version (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 onset of World War I in order to appreciate the progress that had been achieved since.
I opened The Theory of Money and Credit at Christmas in 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; namely, the nature, the causes, and the consequences of the subjective value of money.
I did not close the book before I had studied it from cover to cover and taken numerous notes. By the end, I had become a great admirer of this old economist from Vienna. I had started to become a Misesian. The next thing was to read as many books by Mises as I could get my hands on. One of these books was National Economy (Nationalökonomie: Theorie des Handelns und Wirtschaftens), the German-language predecessor of Human Action.
At the time, there was not much secondary 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. But the hypothesis was not absurd. It served me well in the case of another example; namely, The Theory of Money and Credit.
In The Theory of Money and Credit, as I’ve pointed out in two papers, there are major translation problems which vitiate the general message of the text, and one consequence of this was the emergence of advocates of fractional reserve banking within the Austrian group in the US. It’s a consequence of this wrong translation. So it served me well in that case that I studied the original text.
But in the case of Human Action, it was an 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.
The great disadvantage of writing in a foreign language is that you lose nuance and context in translation.
That’s a big problem, of course, for everything related to literature. It makes it very difficult to translate it sometimes. But it’s also a problem in the social sciences, most notably for the work of historians, who deal precisely with nuances, deal with the special and often unique circumstances of human action that prevail here and there, but not elsewhere and at other times. But that is not a big problem for praxeology, which after all deals with universals. That is, with what holds true at all times and in all places.
The great advantage of writing in a foreign language is that it becomes impossible to brush over any imprecision in thought. You cannot cheat, so to say, by using vague, ambiguous expressions and so on. So in the case of Human Action, we have such a fine book, not least of all, because it is crystal clear.
