Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

London, Edinburgh, Glasgow: William Hodge and Company Limited, 1949. British first edition. Hardcover. This is the scarce British first edition of Ludwig von Mises's “most monumental achievement” and “the first comprehensive treatise on economic theory written since the First World War." This copy is noteworthy for superior condition, the volume near fine, attributable in part to the presence of the quite elusive original dust jacket.

The green cloth binding is square, tight, immaculately clean, and entirely unfaded with slight wrinkling to the spine ends the only appreciable wear. The contents are crisp and clean, with mild age-toning but no previous ownership marks. The dust jacket, printed in green on tan stock, is unclipped, retaining the original lower front flap price. Losses are minor, at the spine ends, flap fold corners and bottom half of the rear flap fold, and a tiny hole at the center rear joint. The jacket has mildly toned faces and a moderately toned spine which also shows minor soiling and staining. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (1881-1973) was “one of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the twentieth century” and Human Action was his most important work. Only slightly hyperbolized on the dust jacket flap, “This book is the counterweight of Marx’s ‘Das Kapital,’ of Lord Keynes ‘General Theory,’ and of countless other books recommending socialization, planning, credit expansion, and similar panaceas… In this analysis of the fundamental drives to action of human beings, Professor Mises shows why only the free market and free enterprise can produce that outpouring of goods and services that is democratically controlled by the daily decisions of buyers who prefer one product to another, and why it is that every system substitutes the opinion of a small group which determines what the public should want or what is good for it.”

As head of the ‘Austrian School,’ and increasingly out of step with the prevailing theories of his time, “Mises concluded that the only viable economic policy for the human race was a policy of unrestricted laissez-faire, of free markets and the unhampered exercise of the right of private property, with government strictly limited to the defense of person and property… in the face of a century increasingly devoted to statism and collectivism, Mises became famous for his ‘intransigence’.

Mises fled the Nazis, emigrating to the United States in 1940, publishing his first books in English in the 1940s and, despite the “unpopularity of his epistemological and political views, had a broad and enduring influence on a number of students and admirers, and “was able to build a remarkably strong and loyal following among businessmen and other non-academics”. Perhaps his most consequential student, Friedrich Hayek, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974 – the year after Mises died – for his work in elaborating Mises’s business cycle theory during the later 1920s and 1930s. “Human Action has sold extraordinarily well ever since the year of its original publication.” (Mises.org)