A Critique of Interventionism
Foreword by Margit von Mises
My husband wrote the essays in this book in the early 1920s, more than fifty years ago. They were collected and published as an anthology in 1929 by Gustav Fischer, formerly in Jena, now in Stuttgart, under the title Kritik des Interventionismus. Although these articles deal with the economic problems of that day, the same problems are still with us, perhaps in an even more serious and menacing way than ever.
The book has recently been republished in Germany by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft in Darmstadt, with a preface by my husband’s friend and former student, the illustrious Professor F.A. von Hayek, 1974 Nobel laureate in economics. The new German edition includes the essay “The Nationalization of Credit?” which also appears in this translation.
I am very happy that this book is now being made available in English. I am no economist, but I have gone over the German and English texts of these essays, and I congratulate Professor Hans F. Sennholz, whom I asked to do the translation, for his brilliant work. He has done a remarkable job of transposing the lengthy, complicated sentences—so typical of the German language of the 1920s—into fluent and elegant English. I am proud to see my husband’s work presented in this form to a new audience, and I hope it will be read widely.
Margit von Mises
