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This speech was delivered at the Mises
Institute, September 14, 1999, the date on which Human Action was published 50 years earlier. The Mises Institute has just published the pocket paperback edition.
In a 1949 memo circulated within Yale University
Press, the publicity department expressed astonishment at the rapid sales of
Ludwig von Mises's Human Action. How could
such a dense tome, expensive by the standards of the day, written by an
economist without a prestigious teaching position or any notable reputation
at all in the United States, published against the advice of many on Yale's
academic advisory board, sell so quickly that a second and third printing
would be necessary in only a matter of months?
Imagine how shocked these same people would be to
find that the first edition, reissued 50 years later as the Scholar's Edition of Human
Action, would
sell so quickly again.
How can we account for the continuing interest in
this book? It is unquestionably the single most important scientific treatise
on human affairs to appear in this century. But given the state of the social
sciences, and the timelessness of Mises's approach
to economics, I believe it will have an even greater impact on the next
century. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that this is a book for the ages.
Human Action appeared in the midst of ideological and political
turmoil. The world war had only recently ended, and the United States was
attempting to reshape the politics of Europe with a new experiment in global
foreign aid. The Cold War was just beginning.
Virtually overnight, Russia went from ally to enemy
– a shocking transition considering that nothing much had changed in
Russia. It had been a prison camp since 1918 and its largest imperial
advances in Europe had taken place with the full complicity of FDR. But in
order to sustain wartime economic planning in the United States, and all the
spending that entailed, it became necessary for the United States to find
another foreign foe. By 1949, the United States began to fight socialism
abroad by imposing it at home.
Indeed, on this day 50 years ago, the old idea of
the liberal society was gone, seemingly forever. It was a relic of a distant age,
and certainly not a model for a modern industrial society. The future was
clear: the world would move toward government planning in all aspects of life
and away from the anarchy of markets. As for the economic profession, the
Keynesian School had not yet reached its height, but that was soon to come.
Socialist theory enthralled the profession to the
extent that Mises and Hayek were thought to have
lost the debate over whether socialism was economically possible. Labor
unions had been delivered a setback with the Taft-Hartley Act, but it would be many years before the dramatic
declines in membership would take place. In academia, a new generation was
being raised to believe that FDR and World War II saved us from the
Depression, and that there were no limits to what the state could do. Ruling
the land was a regime characterized by regimentation in intellectual, social,
and political life.
Human Action appeared in this setting not as polite suggestion
that the world take another look at the merits of free enterprise. No, it was
a seamless and uncompromising statement of theoretical purity that was
completely at odds with the prevailing view. Even more than that, Mises dared to do what was completely unfashionable then
and now, which is to build a complete system of thought from the ground up.
Even Mises's former students were taken aback by
the enormity of his argument and the purity of his stand. As Hans Hoppe has
explained, some of the shock that greeted the book was due to its integration
of the full range of philosophy, economic theory, and political analysis.
When you read Human Action, what you get is
not a running commentary on the turmoil of the time, but rather a pristine
theoretical argument that seems to rise above it all. To be sure, Mises addresses the enemies of freedom in these pages
– and they happen to be the same enemies of freedom that surround us
today. But much more remarkable is the way he was able to detach himself from the rough-and-tumble of daily events and
write a book restating and advancing a pure science of economic logic, from
the first page to the last. It contains not a word or phrase designed to
appeal to the biases of the world around him. Instead, he sought to make a
case that would transcend his generation.
To appreciate how difficult this is to do as a
writer, it is useful to look back at essays we may have written last year or
10 years ago. Quite often, they have all the feel of their time. If any of us
have written anything that can hold up 5 years later, much less 50, we should
feel extremely happy at our accomplishment. And yet Mises
sustained a 1,000-page book on politics and economics that doesn't feel dated
in the least – or at least that was the consensus of the students we
recently had in our offices to reread the entire work.
Consider Samuelson's Economics, which made its first appearance in 1948. It's no accident that it's
in its 16th edition. It had to be continually updated to fix the theories and
models that events rendered anachronistic in only a few years. Even as late
as 1989, the book was predicting that the Soviets would surpass the United
States in production in a few years. Needless to say, that had to go. Last
year, a publisher brought out the first edition – as a kind of museum
piece, the way you might reproduce an old phonograph record. In any case, it
didn't sell well.
Incidentally, when John Kenneth Galbraith reviewed Human Action in the New York
Times, he called it a nice piece of intellectual nostalgia. Interesting.
Does anyone read any of Galbraith's books today for any other reason? Our
purpose in reissuing the first edition, on the other hand, was not nostalgia:
it was to introduce a new generation to what it means to think clearly about
the problems of social order. We still have so much to learn from Mises.
I think we need to reflect on what it required of Mises personally to write the book. He had been uprooted
from his homeland, and much of his beloved Europe was in tatters. Well past
midlife, Mises had to start over, with a new
language and a new setting. It would have been so easy for him to look around
at the world and conclude that freedom was doomed and that his life had been
a waste.
Try to imagine the intellectual courage it required
for him to sit down and write, as he did, an all-encompassing apologia for
the old liberal cause, giving it a scientific foundation, battling it out
with every enemy of freedom, and ending this huge treatise with a call for
the entire world to change direction from its present course onto an entirely
new one.
I'm sometimes accused of having an excessively pious
devotion to the man Mises, but it is impossible not
to notice, in the thicket of his dense argument, that he was also a singular
character in the history of ideas, a man of uncommon vision and courage.
When we honor Human Action on this great
anniversary of the book's publication, we must also honor the fighting spirit
that led him to write it in the first place, and to see it through to its
miraculous publication.
What are the political and economic trends that have
come to pass in the last 50 years? The rise of new technologies, whose
existence are best explained through a Misesian theory. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its
client states, for the reasons explained in this book. The failure of the
welfare state, again foretold in these pages. The widespread disappointment
in the results of positivist methods in the social sciences, also addressed
here.
Indeed, if we look at the failure of the welfare
state, the persistence of the business cycle, the hyperinflation in Asia, the
collapse of currencies in South America, the benefits we've derived from
deregulation in our own country, and the meltdown of social-insurance
schemes, we'll see that each is addressed and predicted in Human Action.
Again, each is discussed in terms of timeless principles.
But none of these issues touch on what I find to be
the most encouraging trend of our time: the decline in the moral and
institutional status of the central state itself. Quite often in the press
these days, pundits decry the rise of cynicism and antigovernment feeling
among the public. But what does this really mean? Surely not that Misesian theory has come to capture the imagination of
the masses. We are a long way from that. What they are decrying is the end of
the old intellectual and political regime that was just coming into its own
when Mises's book appeared in 1949, and has been
breaking apart since at least 1989.
The same level of respect is not shown to leaders in
Washington as it was in those years. Involvement in politics or the civil
service is not valued as highly. In those days, the state got the best and
brightest. These days, it gets those who have no other job prospects. The
public sector is not the place to look for bandwidth. Moreover, hardly anyone
believes that central planners are capable of miracles anymore, and the
public tends to distrust those who claim otherwise. The political rhetoric of
our time must account for the rise of markets and private initiative, and
acknowledge the failure of the state.
Now, there are exceptions. There is the Bill Bradley campaign, which, as far as I can tell, is driven by
the idea that Clinton has cut the government too much! And then there are the
conservatives at the Weekly Standard. Last week's issue called for
something new: what they have dubbed "One Nation Conservatism." The
idea is to combine the conservative domestic statism
of George W. with the conservative foreign-policy statism
of John McCain. This is what might be called the politics of the worst of all
worlds.
The entire approach fails to come to terms with a
central insight of Mises's treatise: namely, that
reality imposes limits on how expansive our vision of government can be. You
can dream about the glories of a society without freedom all you want, but no
matter how impressive the plans look on paper, they may not be achieved in
the real world because economizing behavior requires, most fundamentally,
private property, which is the institutional basis of civilization.
Government is the enemy of private property, and for
that reason becomes the enemy of civilization when it attempts to perform
anything but the most minimal functions. And even here, Mises
says, if it were possible to permit individuals freedom from the state
altogether, it should be done.
People were not ready for that message then but they
are more ready for it now, because we live in times when government routinely
confiscates one-half or more of the profits associated with entrepreneurship
and labor. Politics consists of 100,000 pressure groups trying to get their
hands on the loot. Why would anyone believe that it would be a good idea to
expand this system?
Let me read you the rationale for this One-Nation
Conservatism. It will inspire people to throw themselves into what they call
public service. Public service has four main merits in their view: it
"forces people to develop broader judgment, sacrifice for the greater
good, hear the call of duty, and stand up for their beliefs."
These are all desirable traits. But I fail to see
how they have anything to do with politics. Rather, a politicized society
tends to produce the opposite: narrow judgment, selfishness, petty graft, and
compromise. And that's putting the best-possible spin on it.
Who are the real visionaries today? They are
software developers, communications entrepreneurs, freedom-minded
intellectuals, homeschoolers, publishers who take risks, and businessmen of
every variety who have mastered the art of serving the public through
excellence – and doing it despite every obstacle that the state places
in their way.
The real visionaries today are the people who
continue to struggle to live normal lives – raising children, getting a
good education, building healthy neighborhoods, producing beautiful art and
music, innovating in the world of business – despite the attempt by the
state to distort and destroy most of what is great and good in our world
today.
One of the great rhetorical errors of Mises's time and ours has been to reverse the meaning of
public and private service. As Murray Rothbard
pointed out, private service implies that your behavior and your motivation is about helping no one but yourself. If you want an
example, tour the halls of a random bureaucratic palace in DC.
Public service, on the other hand, implies a
voluntary sacrifice of our own interests for the sake of others, and I
suggest to you that this the most overlooked feature of a free society.
Whether it is entrepreneurs serving their customers, parents serving their
children, teachers serving their students, pastors serving the faithful, or
intellectuals serving the cause of truth and wisdom, we find an authentic
public ethic and a real broadness of judgement; it
is in the voluntary nexus of human action where we find the call of duty
being acted on. It is here we find people standing up for their beliefs. It
is here we find true idealism.
It was Mises's firm
conviction that ideas, and ideas alone, can bring about a change in the
course of history. It is for this reason that he was able to complete his
great book and live a heroic life despite every attempt to silence him.
The scholarly followers of Mises
in our own time exhibit these traits, and inspire us every day with their
innovative, principled, and radical approach to remaking the world of ideas.
In their work for the Quarterly Journal of Austrian
Economics, in their
books, and in their teaching we see the ideals of Mises
being fulfilled.
At a low point in his life, Mises
wondered if he had become nothing but a historian of decline. But he quickly
recalled his motto from Virgil: "Do not give in to evil, but proceed
ever more boldly against it." With Human Action, Mises did just that. He was to die around the time that
Nixon went off the gold standard and imposed wage and price controls, to
Republican cheers. He didn't live to see what we see today – nothing
short of the systematic unraveling of the statist enterprise of our century
– but he did foresee that hope was not lost for the flourishing of
human liberty. For that great virtue of hope, we must all be very grateful.
Let me also say how grateful I am to everyone
involved in the production of the Scholar's Edition on this 50th anniversary,
from our members to our faculty to our staff. Mises smiles today.
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr
LewRockwell.com
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is founder and president
of the Ludwig
von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama,
editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of Speaking of Liberty.
Copyright
© 2010 by LewRockwell.com. By authorization from Lew Rockwell
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