Human Action is more than a book about economics broadly construed. It is a guide to civilized social life which elucidates the laws of reality that apply if human persons are to engage in peaceful and prosperous social cooperation under the division of labor.
For Mises, economics is a body of substantive truths about the institutional foundations of human society. Thus, what is at stake in formulating a well-founded and coherent structure of economic theory is not an incremental change in GDP or “social welfare” but the fate of humanity. This unique view of economics accounts for Mises’s defense of laissez-faire capitalism as the only thinkable economic system consistent with the rational allocation of resources under specialization and the division of labor that is indispensable to human material and spiritual flourishing.
As the reader will soon discover, all the essays in this book are profoundly inspired by Mises’s vision of economics. The authors who contributed to this volume span four academic generations.