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[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach .]   Many socialist authors emphasize that the recurrence of economic crises and business depressions is a phenomenon inherent in the capitalist mode of production. On the other hand, a socialist system is safe against this evil. As has

[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach .]   “The boom is built on the sands of banknotes and deposits. It must collapse.” The erroneous belief that the essential feature of the boom is overinvestment and not malinvestment is due to the habit of judging conditions merely

[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition .] In dealing with the consequences of credit expansion we assumed that the total amount of additional fiduciary media enters the market system via the loan market as advances to business. All that has been predicated with regard to the effects of credit expansion

[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach .] The theory of the cyclical fluctuations of business as elaborated by the British Currency School was in two respects unsatisfactory. First, it failed to recognize that circulation credit can be granted not only by the issue of

[This article is excerpted from chapter 19 of Human Action : The Scholar’s Edition .] Originary interest is the ratio of the value assigned to want-satisfaction in the immediate future and the value assigned to want-satisfaction in remoter periods of the future. It manifests itself in the market economy in the discount of future goods as against

The popularity of inflation and credit expansion, the ultimate source of the repeated attempts to render people prosperous by credit expansion, and thus the cause of the cyclical fluctuations of business, manifests itself clearly in the customary terminology. The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the

[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach .] There are in the changing economy always unsold inventories (exceeding those quantities that for technical reasons must be kept in stock), unemployed workers, and unused capacity of inconvertible production facilities. The system is

[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Human Action: The Scholar’s Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach .]   In dealing with the futile attempts to explain the cyclical fluctuations of business by a nonmonetary doctrine, one point must first of all be stressed which has hitherto been unduly neglected. There were schools of thought for

[This article first appeared in the American Scholar (Spring 1943): pp. 220–31. This is its first appearance online.]   Why did democracy fail on the European continent? What forces prevented Europe from maintaining popular government? Who were the gravediggers of European parliamentarism? There can hardly be any questions more pressing. The

[Excerpted from chapter 7 of Theory and History .] Any philosophy of history must demonstrate the mechanism by means of which the supreme agency that directs the course of all human affairs induces individuals to walk in precisely the ways which are bound to lead mankind toward the goal set. In Marx’s system the doctrine of the class struggle is