Human Action
from Ludwig von Mises
Translation of the masterpiece
We at Incrementum believe that the dissemination of better ideas is essential to the preservation of a free and peaceful society. Therefore, we decided to make an earmarked donation to the renowned Vienna institute “scholarium”, with the support of which Ludwig von Mises’ magnum opus “Human Action” will be translated into German.
The scientific translation of “Human Action” by the charitable institution scholarium makes the most important piece of writing by the great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, again accessible to the German-speaking
public. Ludwig von Mises fled from the National Socialist regime to Switzerland and on to the USA, where he continued to teach and write in English. Therefore, many of his central works have been available only in English.
the work
“Human Action” is the magnum opus by the great economist Ludwig von Mises. As early as in 1940, Mises had attempted to present the entire corpus of the economic science – value and price theory, monetary and economic cycle theory, and the coherent methodological foundation of economics as science – in one work, i.e. “Nationalökonomie: Theorie des Handelns und des Wirtschaftens“ (Economics: a Theory of (Economic) Action), written in German. The text was also a summary of the most important findings of realistic economics as well as a new start in an era when economics, driven by the political madness of the 1940s, had been locked into a big crisis.
With the publication of Human Action, Mises created more than just a translated version of his earlier treatise on economics after emigrating to the USA, but a crucially expanded and improved text. In particular, Mises managed to develop new, essential aspects in rejecting socialism and all kinds of centralist interventions. He dedicated a completely new chapter to uncertainty as central determinant of economic decision-making. Here, Mises refines his previously developed positions by distinguishing between apodictic knowledge (the “a priori” of praxeology), class probability, as basic epistemological position of natural sciences and case probability as epistemology of historical science.
Ludwig von Mises returns to a position where man is the logical point of origin when it comes to thinking about human action (the economic action). In doing so, he offers a well-founded alternative both to the autistic economics of robotic model humans and to the ideological arbitrariness that dominates today’s universities of economics as “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy”. Many additional small adjustments and expansions make Human Action a self-contained work that has been of outstanding value to generations of younger economists in the USA.
During his life, Ludwig von Mises’s interest went far beyond curricula and scientific methods. Man’s freedom is at stake. There is the risk of economics turning into a cult of social planning that requires our freedom as sacrifice. Human Action is a systematic compendium of economic theory that can continue to spearhead the intellectual self-defence of future generations.
Incrementum is proud to support scholarium financially to facilitate the long-overdue translation of “Human Action” into German. The translation project was successfully completed in 2019.