Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 112–115
Robert P. Murphy’s Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action seeks to provide the reader with a “modern condensed treatment” of Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action. Robert P. Murphy is a long-time contributor to Austrian economics, and has been a serious student of Mises’s work, having authored the Study Guide to Human Action in 2010, and the Study Guide to The Theory of Money and Credit in 2011. In Choice, Murphy uses Human Action as the primary source, but, as a good professor, focuses his efforts not on simply relaying what is already “in the book,” but on emphasizing the important, explaining the difficult, and elucidating the context. The result is a book that can serve as a companion to—or, for many, even a substitute for—reading Mises’s rather imposing Human Action.