The Consequences of Human Action: Intended or Unintended?

This file is a short argumentative essay by Murray N. Rothbard on the methodological slogan that Austrian economics studies “the consequences of human action, not human design.” Its scope is narrow but polemical: Rothbard challenges a familiar Ferguson–Hayek formulation, argues that it misconstrues praxeology, and connects that error to political evasions about the growth of the state.

Some economists are given to insisting that Austrian economics studies only the unintended consequences of human action, or, in the favorite phrase (from the 18th-century Scottish sociologist Adam Ferguson as filtered down to F.A. Hayek), “the consequences of human action, not human design.”

Rothbard begins by granting the slogan’s surface plausibility. The market often produces social coordination beyond any single person’s benevolent intention, as in the Smithian butcher-and-baker example. Yet his concession is brief, because the point of the essay is to show that the slogan becomes false once “intention” is taken seriously.

They may intend to achieve a profit, but the efficient production for consumer wants and the advancement of the prosperity of all is the unintended consequence of their actions.

The first conceptual move is epistemic and reflexive. Rothbard asks how economists can know whether market participants intend only profit, only service, or both. If businessmen learn economics and come to understand that profit-seeking can serve consumers and society, then what had been described as an “unintended” consequence may become an intended one. Economic theory does not merely observe action from outside; it can enter actors’ own understanding and reshape their purposes.

So if, as some indicate, economic theory only studies unintended consequences of human action, does the learning of some economic theory by businessmen invalidate that theory because now these consequences are consciously intended by the participants on the market?

This question is central to the essay’s structure. Rothbard proceeds from the Smithian example to a critique of the unintended-consequences formula, then to a positive Misesian alternative. Human action, for him, is not blind adjustment but purposive conduct: actors choose means in pursuit of ends, and they may succeed in bringing about consequences they consciously seek.

Mises’s emphasis on conscious choice treats men and women as rational, conscious actors in the market and the world; the other tradition often falls into the trap of treating people as if they were robots or amoebae blindly responding to stimuli.

The argument is therefore not merely terminological. Rothbard’s deeper claim is that Austrian economics, properly Misesian, studies action as intentional and goal-directed while also recognizing that many results exceed any one actor’s plan. The issue is not whether unintended consequences exist, but whether they should monopolize the definition of economic explanation.

So what is so great about unintended consequences, and why may no intended consequences be studied as well?

The essay then turns sharply from methodology to politics. Rothbard argues that an exclusive stress on unintended consequences can become apologetic: if social outcomes are habitually treated as nobody’s design, then the expansion of state power may be presented as an impersonal drift rather than as the product of interested actors seeking privilege.

For if actions are largely always unintended, this means that government just grew like Topsy, and that no person or group ever willed the pernicious consequences of that growth.

This is the essay’s most revealing move. Rothbard sees methodological language as politically consequential because it can either expose or conceal agency. To describe government growth as merely unintended is, in his view, to obscure the conscious pursuit of advantage by groups using the rhetoric of public interest.

The closing contrast is strategic as well as theoretical. Rothbard identifies one path as an uncompromising Misesian economics that names special interests and rejects euphemism; the other seeks respectability by diluting the free-market message. His preferred path is explicit and confrontational.

One is to fearlessly hold high the banner of Misesian theory to which the wise and honest can repair—a banner which requires calling a spade a spade and pointing out the special interests all too consciously at work behind the government’s glittering facade of the “public interest” and the “general welfare.”

The relevance of the essay lies in this linkage between praxeology, intellectual clarity, and political critique. Rothbard is not denying spontaneous order; he is rejecting the elevation of spontaneity into a doctrine that erases intention. For him, Austrian economics must explain both unintended coordination and consciously pursued ends, especially where power and privilege are concerned.