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1. Purposeful Action and Animal Reaction Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that

According to the doctrines of universalism, conceptual realism, holism, collectivism, and some representatives of Gestaltpsychologie , society is an entity living its own life, independent of and separate from the lives of the various individuals, acting on its own behalf and aiming at its own ends which are different from the ends sought by the

The Revolt Against Reason It is true that some philosophers were ready to overrate the power of human reason. They believed that man can discover by ratiocination the final causes of cosmic events, the inherent ends the prime mover aims at in creating the universe and determining the course of its evolution. They expatiated on the “Absolute” as if

The words freedom and liberty signified for the most eminent representatives of mankind one of the most precious and desirable goods. Today it is fashionable to sneer at them. They are, trumpets the modern sage, “slippery” notions and “bourgeois” prejudices. Freedom and liberty are not to be found in nature. In nature there is no phenomenon to

Praxeology and History The Formal and Aprioristic Character of Praxeology The Alleged Logical Heterogeneity of Primitive Man The A Priori and Reality The Principle of Methodological Individualism I and We The Principle of Methodological Singularism The Individual and Changing Features of Human Action The Scope and the Specific Method of History

1. Uncertainty and Acting The uncertainty of the future is already implied in the very notion of action. That man acts and that the future is uncertain are by no means two independent matters. They are only two different modes of establishing one thing. We may assume that the outcome of all events and changes is uniquely determined by eternal

The essay was first published in 1969. It was one of the last pieces Mises wrote. The peculiar state of German ideological and political conditions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century generated the conflict between two schools of thought out of which the Methodenstreit and the appellation “Austrian School” emerged. But the antagonism

Why have a monetary system based on gold? Because, as conditions are today and for the time that can be foreseen today, the gold standard alone makes the determination of money’s purchasing power independent of the ambitions and machinations of governments, of dictators, of political parties, and of pressure groups. The gold standard alone is what

1. Ends and Means The result sought by an action is called its end, goal, or aim. One uses these terms in ordinary speech also to signify intermediate ends, goals, or aims; these are points which acting man wants to attain only because he believes that he will reach his ultimate end, goal, or aim in passing beyond them. Strictly speaking the end,

[This article is from chapter 5 of Human Action . Robert Murphy has written a study guide for this chapter, available in HTML and PDF . This chapter follows “A First Analysis of the Category of Action.” ] 1. Time as a Praxeological Factor The notion of change implies the notion of temporal sequence. A rigid, eternally immutable universe would be