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[Preface to Revised Edition of Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market , May 1993] One of the unhappy casualties of World War I, it seems, was the old-fashioned treatise on economic “principles.” Before World War I, the standard method, both of presenting and advancing economic thought, was to write a disquisition setting forth one’s vision

[ An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)]   Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) began as a devoted Smithian but more consistently attached to laissez-faire. During his relatively brief span of interest in economics, he became more and more statist. His intensified statism was merely one aspect of his major — and highly

[ Man, Economy, and State (1962)] 1. The Concept of Action The distinctive and crucial feature in the study of man is the concept of action . Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior. It is therefore sharply distinguishable from those observed movements which, from the point of view of man, are not purposeful. These include all the

[ An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)]   In contrast to Great Britain, the German-speaking countries were predictably highly resistant to the spread of Smithian views. They had been ruled, ever since the late 16th century, by cameralism. Cameralists, named after the German royal treasure chamber, the Kammer,

[ An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)]   In this atmosphere deeply permeated with cameralism it is no wonder that Smith’s Wealth of Nations made little headway at first in Germany. However, Britain had an important foothold in Germany, for the electorate of Hanover was a continental possession of the British dynasty

[ An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)]   Smithianism also began to penetrate Russian political culture. Cultural and intellectual life had only begun to flower in that backward and despotic empire in the mid-18th century. The University of Moscow, the first university in Russia, started at the late date of 1755.

[ An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)] By the turn of the 19th century, the views and doctrines of Adam Smith had swept the board of European opinion, though they had scarcely been embodied in political institutions. Even in France, as will be seen in the second volume of this series, the pre-Smithian subjective

In fact, the Virginia colony was not doing very well in drawing off England’s surplus poor. Besides transporting vagrants and criminals to Virginia, the London Company and the City of London agreed to transport poor children from London to Virginia. However, the poorest refused the proffered boon and the company moved to obtain warrants to force

[ Conceived in Liberty (1975)] The survival of the Virginia colony hung for years by a hairbreadth. One major reason for the survival of this distressed colony was the changes that the Virginia Company agreed to make in its social structure . The other major factor in the survival of the colony was the discovery by John Rolfe, about 1612, that

The Law of Returns We have concluded that the value of each unit of any good is equal to its marginal utility at any point in time, and that this value is determined by the relation between the actor’s scale of wants and the stock of goods available. We know that there are two types of goods: consumers’ goods, which directly serve human wants, and