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Human Action: The Scholar's Edition Paperback – November 29, 2010

by Ludwig von Mises (Author)

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The great book first appeared in German in 1940 and then disappeared, only to reappear in English in 1949. It was a sensation, the largest and most scientific defense of human freedom ever published. And now, in 2010, the seemingly impossible has happened: Human Action, the masterwork of the ages, is in a pocketbook edition at a ridiculously low price.

History might record that this edition is the one that changed the world. Mises's fantastic and timeless treatise has never been in a more portable, giftable edition.

Just imagine: giving or receiving this gem, this treasure, as a stocking stuffer!

This is not a reduction. It is the full treatise from front to back, the mind-blowing explanation of the economics of freedom, right in the palm of your hand.

Stock up! We've prepared for mass distribution.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ludwig von Mises Institute
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 29, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 912 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1610161459
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1610161459
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.34 pounds

Best Sellers Rank: #79,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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257 ratings

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Customers find this book to be an amazing treatise on economics and consider it one of the greatest works by Mises. The writing style is well-received, with customers describing it as enjoyable to read, and they appreciate its insightful content, with one customer noting how it helps see various fallacies. The print size receives criticism for being too small to read.

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Insight Value for money Economics content Writing style Action theory Print size

18 customers mention "Insight"18 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful, with one customer noting it is a great treatise on political economy, while another mentions how it helps reveal various fallacies.

"...Mises Institute, founded in 1982, is a thriving research and educational center for classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the..." Read more

"...of Human Action, *Human Action as an Ultimate Given, *Rationality and Irrationality, *Causality as a Requirement for Action, * The Alter Ego, and so..." Read more

"...Human Action is the most recent (hopefully not the last) great treatise on political economy...." Read more

"Very informative. Learned a lot." Read more

18 customers mention "Value for money"18 positive0 negative

Customers find the book to be well worth the time and of perfect quality.

"...undertaking; Mises covers every aspect of economics; This is a thorough book and could be use as a 4 year university study...." Read more

"...Took a while to read but was worth the time and effort." Read more

"This is the best economics book ever, probably the best book ever...." Read more

"A difficult, but essential read for persons wanting to have a foundation in the logic of economics...." Read more

17 customers mention "Economics content"17 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the economics content of the book, describing it as an amazing treatise on the subject, with one customer highlighting the importance of monetary calculation and another noting how prices are determined by subjective values.

"...was quite impressed with this massive undertaking; Mises covers every aspect of economics; This is a thorough book and could be use as a 4 year..." Read more

"...Some of the more significant are: that prices are determined by subjective values; that economic calculation requires the price mechanism to..." Read more

"...This book is a painstaking analysis of economic man with a deep, almost tedious dive into the relationship of such economic concepts and terms as..." Read more

"...Economic calculation is common to all people. Mises insisted that the logical structure of human minds is the same for everybody...." Read more

8 customers mention "Writing style"8 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the writing style of the book, finding it well written and enjoyable to read, with one customer noting it is simple but not simplistic.

"...Nonetheless, he continued to write prolifically and to lecture – he was still presenting seminars at the age of 90!..." Read more

"I find that the way all is explained is thorough and quite well written. Took a while to read but was worth the time and effort." Read more

"This is the brilliant Ludwig von Mises master work...." Read more

"An amazingly eye-opening text, not helped at all by the tiny size of the paperback edition, and the even smaller font...." Read more

6 customers mention "Action theory"6 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's action theory, describing it as a masterpiece that provides a unified study of human behavior, with one customer noting how it changes perceptions and misconceptions.

"...Human Action is a masterpiece." Read more

"...Animal Reaction, *The Prerequisites of Human Action, *Human Action as an Ultimate Given, *Rationality and Irrationality, *Causality as a Requirement..." Read more

"...Human Action is the most recent (hopefully not the last) great treatise on political economy...." Read more

"...economics book - actually about much more - praxology - a unified study of human action in all its facets - economic, political, social,..." Read more

18 customers mention "Print size"0 positive18 negative

Customers find the print size of the book too small, making it barely readable.

"...run and and excellent text book on Economics but I found it very difficult to read. The book is well advanced of any college econ course I took...." Read more

"...at all by the tiny size of the paperback edition, and the even smaller font...." Read more

"...premises, Mises' language can, at times, be archaic, his style not always crystal clear and often verbose--sometimes taking two pages to express..." Read more

"Beware, is a hard read, but a most for libertarians and anyone who wants to learn about economy in a right way..." Read more

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RonanTheBarbarian
How to Run A Country
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2016
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Finally finished reading the 1170 page book, 'Human Action- A Treatise on Economics' by Ludwig von Mises; first published in 1940 and re-published in 2010; appropriate today as it was at the previous time. The general theme: government intervention between free enterprise producer and the consumer, other than protecting both from anarchy, criminals, foreign manipulation, invaders or any other interference for competitive commerce, usually ends up counter productive to the market. Price/rent controls imposed and usually thought to be a good idea at the time, ends up counter productive.(e.g.: Rent control favors a few; others subsidize the few; new rents skyrocket; no new apartments are built, contractors and investors no longer trust the government not to do the same thing again; housing crisis; how do you reverse the problem; public housing/low cost housing, again paid by you and me, a subsidy; the government becomes a consumer of property at our expense; remember, 35 years ago, it started as a well intended plan to protect the elderly/needy; a good majority of those people are no longer on the planet; the new rent controlled occupants are so attached to the rent 'deal' that they will never venture the idea to buy their own home which ultimately would have been a more secure position for their future needs and investment; they are enslaved to the government intervention through negative incentive. Needless to say, I was quite impressed with this massive undertaking; Mises covers every aspect of economics; This is a thorough book and could be use as a 4 year university study. This book could be called: "How to Run a Country', not with promises of a parent/government with child/consumer relationship, but allowing the adults of society to negotiate the commerce of producer and consumer, whereby the consumer runs the country by making choices that give him/her a continuing better standard of comfort, and the producer/entrepreneur adjusts his production or goes out of business. Yin/Yang; Ann Rand, where are you; Atlas Shrugged, again

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Peter Francis Fenwick
Human Action is a Masterpiece from one of the Intellectual Giants of the Twentieth Century
Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2014
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Ludwig von Mises was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century. His contributions to economics, political theory and the social sciences were profound.

Born in Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1881, Mises graduated from the University of Vienna with a Doctor of Laws in 1906. From 1909, he worked in economic public policy for the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, combining this with research, writing scholarly works and lecturing at the University. In the twenties, he ran a fortnightly Privatseminar for a select group of young Viennese intellectuals many of whom later became famous in their own right; they included economists Gottfried von Haberler, Friedrich Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, Richard von Strigl, and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, plus philosopher Felix Kaufmann, sociologist Alfred Shutz, and philosopher of history Erich Voegelin.

During this period he wrote his path-breaking work on monetary theory, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Nation, State and Economy (1919), Socialism (1922), Liberalism (1927), Monetary Stabilization and Cyclical Policy (1928), A Critique of Interventionism (1929), and Epistemological Problems of Economics (1933).
In 1934, after forty years in Vienna, concerned about the inevitability of Nazi takeover, Mises accepted a position at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. Here he was able to devote himself completely to his study of economics which resulted in Nationalokonomie, the basis for his magnum opus Human Action. In 1940, blacklisted by the Nazis and feeling unsafe, he and his wife Margit escaped to America.

He arrived in New York, aged nearly 60, with no job and without complete familiarity with English. The first few years were not easy; a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to the National Bureau of Economic Research provided a modest livelihood; with support from Henry Hazlitt, he undertook a number of assignments for the National Association of Manufacturers; he gave guest lectures at Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton. Two books, Omnipotent Government and Bureaucracy were published by Yale University Press in 1944. By 1946 he held a visiting professorship at New York University’s Graduate School of Business Administration and a staff position at Leonard Reed’s Foundation for Economic Education.
In 1949, he published Human Action; it is a comprehensive treatise on economics. Although built on his Nationalokonomie, it is not a translation; all parts were rewritten and additions made. This is Mises’ magnum opus where he integrates the elements of economic theory that had been his life’s work.
He sets economics within a more universal science of praxeology – the pure logic of choice. People have purposes. They try to achieve goals. They act because they want to change things for the better; to eliminate some felt dissatisfaction. Action is the use of means to achieve ends. People choose their most highly valued preference. All action is rational in that it is attempting to use a means to achieve an end. (That does not preclude people making mistakes!) He believed that our knowledge of praxeology was a priori; “the only way to a cognition of these theorems is logical analysis or our inherent knowledge of the category of action”.

From this base, Mises developed universal laws of economics. This differed from his contemporaries such as Schmoller of the German Historical School who thought that economic laws were true only for particular historical periods and conditions; that each age had its own way of thinking about things. Mises pointed out that attempts to define economics by what has happened historically fail because they are subject to individual, different interpretation (or understanding) of what happened. He explained that economic society is so complex that analysis needs to be based wherever possible on reason, as there are always multiple interpretations of real life events. The champions of logically incompatible theories claim the same events as proof that their point of view has been tested by experience. History cannot teach us any general rule, principal, or law.

So Mises theories apply to all peoples and all times. His contributions are vast. Some of the more significant are: that prices are determined by subjective values; that economic calculation requires the price mechanism to determine the most economic use of resources; that socialism cannot allocate resources efficiently because it lacks this price mechanism; that social cooperation through the free market makes possible the division of labor; that trade and specialization are keys to continued prosperity; that the role of the entrepreneur is crucial - not only to correct disequilibria in the market place but to discover opportunities; that government manipulation of the money supply and interest rates causes recessions; and that humans gain more from peaceful exchange than from destructive struggles.

Mises had many years’ experience advising government. He said, “Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics. Economics … is a challenge to the conceit of those in power. An economist can never be a favorite of autocrats and demagogues. With them he is a mischief maker, and the more they are inwardly convinced that his objections are well founded, the more they hate him.”

In retrospect, it seems that Mises spent his whole life at odds with the prevailing views of the economics profession. He began by disagreeing with the German Historical School which dominated European economics and provided the economic ideas for socialism; he disagreed with Keynes and the interventionism of the New Deal; and he was never a fan of the movement to mathematical economics and econometrics. Nonetheless, he continued to write prolifically and to lecture – he was still presenting seminars at the age of 90! His wife Margit later claimed that the post-War period was his most productive. Now, years after his death, there is a resurgence of Austrian Economics; his contributions are being recognized and his ideas understood.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded in 1982, is a thriving research and educational center for classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. It provides scholarships, educational materials, conferences, media, and literature. There is a Mises Academy providing on-line courses.

Here was a genius whose persistence in challenging the intellectual and political consensus of his day has left us with one of the greatest books on economics ever. Human Action is a masterpiece.

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Ricardo Cortés
Sin duda, una de las mayores contribuciones científicas del siglo XX
Reviewed in Mexico on January 4, 2021
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

En esta gran obra Mises hace una enorme contribución a la ciencia al exponer el método praxeológico como base metodológica para el estudio de los fenómenos sociales, enseñándonos como todos estos fenómenos tienen su punto de origen en la acción individual de cada persona y, por tanto, resulta preciso iniciar su estudio a partir de ese reconocimiento.
La praxeología nos permite a todos estudiar y entender científicamente, sin necesidad de recurrir a la metafísica, los fenómenos sociales y económicos, demostrándolo al aplicarlo a la cataláctica.
Para el lector atento, esta obra de Mises abre las puertas para todo científico interesado en los fenómenos sociales para realizar su estudio a partir del axioma "El ser humano actua", siendo todo fenómeno social una consecuencia lógica de ello.
Imperdible obra y debería ser de lectura obligada para todo estudiante universitario.

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Oscar
Lectura imprescindible
Reviewed in Spain on July 8, 2024
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
Lectura imprescindible

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Amazon Customer
Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on February 22, 2018
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This book is a must read for everyone

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Amazon Kunde
A true masterpiece
Reviewed in Germany on June 24, 2017
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This book is a comprehensive treatise on economics. It's author contributed considerably, probably invaluably, to the elaboration of the epistemological problems of economics. This book starts with outlining the logical and methodological problems of the science and then proceeds to deduce, step by step, what can be considered all essential economic theorems. Ought to be read at least once by everybody who is concerned about the constituent elements of any society.

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Geoffrey B.
Incontournable
Reviewed in France on February 12, 2013
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
L'oeuvre majeure et incontournable de Ludwig von Mises, le pilier central de l'école autrichienne. Les raisonnements praxéologiques et l'individualisme méthodologique utilisés, libérés des nouveaux formalismes macroéconomiques, rendent accessibles à tous un raisonnement clair, logique et brillant.

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How to Run A Country

Human Action is a Masterpiece from one of the Intellectual Giants of the Twentieth Century

Sin duda, una de las mayores contribuciones científicas del siglo XX

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Incontournable