school” of economists who devoted themselves mainly to problems of “social policy.” He later even joined one of those organizations which prompted a German satirical weekly to define economists as persons who went around measuring workingmen’s dwellings and saying they were too small. But in the course of this process, when he was taught political economy as part of his law studies, Mises discovered economic theory in the shape of the Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Principles of Economics) of Carl Menger,5 then about to retire as a professor at the university. As Mises says in his fragment of an autobiography,6 this book made him an economist. Having gone through the same experience, I know what he means.
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Mises’ initial interests had been primarily historical, and to the end he retained a breadth of historical knowledge rare among theoreticians. But, finally, his dissatisfaction with the manner in which historians and particularly economic historians interpreted their material led him to economic theory. His chief inspiration came from Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, who had returned to a professorship at the University of Vienna after serving as Austrian Minister of Finance. During the decade before the war, Böhm-Bawerk’s seminar became the great center for the discussion of economic theory. Its participants included Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, and the outstanding theoretician of Austrian Marxism, Otto Bauer, whose defense of Marxism long dominated the discussion. Böhm-Bawerk’s ideas on socialism during this period appear to have developed a good deal beyond what is shown by the few essays he published before his early death. There is no doubt that the foundations of Mises’ characteristic ideas on socialism were laid then, though almost as soon as he had published his first major work, The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), the opportunity for further systematic pursuit of this interest vanished with Mises’ entry into service for the duration of World War I.
Most of Mises’ military service was spent as an artillery officer on the Russian front, but during the last few months he served in the economic section of the Ministry of War. It must be assumed that he started on Socialism only after his release from military duty. He probably wrote most of it between 1919 and 1921—the crucial section on economic calculation under socialism was in fact provoked by a book by Otto Neurath published in 1919, from which Mises quotes. That under the prevailing conditions he found time to concentrate and to pursue a comprehensive theoretical and philosophical work has remained a wonder to one who at least during the last months of this period saw him almost daily at his official work.
As I suggested before, Socialism shocked our generation, and only slowly and painfully did we become persuaded of its central thesis. Mises continued, of course, thinking about the same range of problems, and many of his further ideas were developed in the “private seminar” which began about the time Socialism was published. I joined the seminar two years later, upon my return from a year of postgraduate study in the United States. Although there were few unquestioning followers at first, he gained interest and admiration among a younger generation and attracted those who were concerned with problems of the borderline of social theory and philosophy. Reception of the book by the profession was mostly either indifferent or hostile. I remember but one review that showed any recognition of Socialism’s importance and that was by a surviving liberal statesman of the preceding
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century. The tactics of his opponents were generally to represent him as an extremist whose views no one else shared.
Mises’ ideas ripened during the next two decades, culminating in the first (1940) German version of what became famous as Human Action.7 But to those of us who experienced its first impact, Socialism will always be his decisive contribution. It challenged the outlook of a generation and altered, if only slowly, the thinking of many. The members of Mises’ Vienna group were not disciples. Most of them came to him as students who had completed their basic training in economics, and only gradually were they converted to his unconventional views. Perhaps they were influenced as much by his disconcerting habit of rightly predicting the ill consequences of current economic policy as by the cogency of his arguments. Mises hardly expected them to accept all his opinions, and the discussions gained much from the fact that the participants were often only gradually weaned from their different views. It was only later, after he had developed a complete system of social thought, that a “Mises School” developed. The very openness of his system enriched his ideas and enabled some of his followers to develop them in somewhat different directions.
Mises’ arguments were not always easily apprehended. Sometimes personal contact and discussion were required to understand them fully. Though written in a pellucid and deceptively simple prose, they tacitly presuppose an understanding of economic processes—an understanding not shared by all his readers. We see this most clearly in his crucial argument on the impossibility of an economic calculation under socialism. When one reads Mises’ opponents, one gains the impression that they did not really see why such calculation was necessary. They treat the problem of economic calculation as if it were merely a technique to make the managers of socialist plants accountable for the resources entrusted to them and wholly unconnected with the problem of what they should produce and how. Any set of magic figures appeared to them sufficient to control the honesty of those still indispensable survivors of a capitalist age. They never seemed to comprehend that it was not a question of playing with some set of figures, but one of establishing the only indicators those managers could have for deciding the role of their activities in the whole structure of mutually adjusted activities. As a result, Mises became increasingly aware that what separated him from his critics was his wholly different intellectual approach to social and economic problems, rather than mere differences of interpretation of particular facts.
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To convince them, he would have to impress on them the necessity of an altogether different methodology. This of course became his central concern.
Publication in 1936 of the English translation was largely the result of the efforts of Professor Lionel C. Robbins (now Lord Robbins). He found a highly qualified translator in a former fellow student at the London School of Economics, Jacques Kahane (1900–1969), who had remained an active member of a circle of academic economists of that generation, although he himself had not remained in the profession. After many years of service with one of the great firms of grain dealers in London, Kahane concluded his career with the United Nations Food and Agricultural Office at Rome and the World Bank at Washington. The typescript of Kahane’s translation was the last form in which I had read the entire text of Socialism, before doing so again in preparation for writing this introduction.
This experience necessarily makes one reflect on the significance of some of Mises’ arguments after so long a period. Much of the work now inevitably sounds much less original or revolutionary than it did in its early years. It has in many ways become one of those “classics” which one too often takes for granted and from which one expects to learn but little that is new. I must admit, however, that I was surprised at not only how much of it is still highly relevant to current disputes, but how many of its arguments, which I initially had only half accepted or regarded as exaggerated and one-sided, have since proved remarkably true. I still do not agree with all of it, nor do I believe that Mises would. He certainly was not one to expect that his followers receive his conclusions uncritically and not progress beyond them. In all, though, I find that I differ rather less than I expected.
One of my differences is over a statement of Mises on page 463 of the 1951 edition (page 418 of this edition). I had always felt a little uneasy about that statement of basic philosophy, but only now can I articulate why I was uncomfortable with it. Mises asserts in this passage that liberalism “regards all social cooperation as an emanation of rationally recognized utility, in which all power is based on public opinion, and can undertake no course of action that would hinder the free decision of thinking men.” It is the first part of this statement only which I now think is wrong. The extreme rationalism of this passage, which as a child of his
