This file is Ludwig von Mises’s 1962 review essay on Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, not the treatise itself. Its scope is both evaluative and polemical: Mises presents Rothbard’s book as a systematic restoration of economics as a science of human action, while attacking the fragmentation, politicization, and mathematical formalism of contemporary economics.
Mises opens by portraying modern social science as largely subordinated to state policy and hostile to the market economy. The review’s immediate target is not only Keynesianism or planning, but the intellectual habit of treating economics as a set of isolated policy problems rather than an interconnected order of action.
Full government control of everybody’s activities — whether called planning, socialism, communism, or any other name — is praised as the panacea.
Against this background, Rothbard’s work matters because it recovers economics as an integrated theoretical system. Mises emphasizes that Rothbard does not merely collect specialized doctrines; he reconstructs economic phenomena from the standpoint of purposeful human conduct.
The main virtue of this book is that it is a comprehensive and methodical analysis of all activities commonly called economic.
The central conceptual move is praxeological. Economic events are not treated as mechanical magnitudes governed by constant quantitative relations, but as outcomes of choice, valuation, means, and ends.
It looks upon these activities as human action, i.e., as conscious striving after chosen ends by resorting to appropriate means.
This leads Mises to stress Rothbard’s critique of mathematical economics. Equilibrium constructions may serve as analytical aids, but they do not describe actual economic processes unfolding in time. The decisive contrast is between physical science, where measurable regularities can be formulated, and economics, where action is intelligible but not reducible to equations.
The equations of physics describe a process through time, while those of economics do not describe a process at all, but merely the final equilibrium point, a hypothetical situation that is outside of time and will never be reached in reality.
For Mises, Rothbard’s rejection of econometric pretensions follows from this: numerical data are historical records, not economic laws. The science of action can use history, but it cannot become measurement in the positivist sense.
As there are no constant relations between any of the elements which the science of action studies, there is no measurement possible and all numerical data available have merely a historical character; they belong to economic history and not to economics as such.
The review then shows how this method bears on substantive theory. In the discussion of unemployment, Mises praises Rothbard for restoring the missing price-theoretic element: the wage rate. Employment cannot be understood apart from the conditions under which labor services clear the market.
It is meaningless to talk of unemployment or employment without reference to a wage rate.
Mises summarizes Rothbard’s view that a worker can sell labor services if the wage adjusts to discounted marginal value product; persistent unemployment arises when labor is offered only at rates or under conditions incompatible with market clearing. This is not presented as a detached technical point, but as part of the larger claim that market phenomena are mutually determined through valuation, exchange, prices, profit, loss, and consumer choice.
Mises does register a reservation: Rothbard’s remarks on philosophy of law and penal questions are, in his judgment, less successful than the economic analysis. But this qualification does not alter the review’s verdict. Rothbard’s book is treated as a major contribution to praxeology and economics.
Henceforth all essential studies in these branches of knowledge will have to take full account of the theories and criticisms expounded by Dr. Rothbard.
The essay closes by widening the question of audience. Economics, Mises argues, cannot be left to specialists because voters ultimately decide economic policy. Ignorance of physics may not prevent engineers from building machines, but ignorance of economics can destroy the institutional basis of prosperity and freedom.
The issues of society's economic organization are every citizen's business.
The relevance of Rothbard’s treatise therefore lies not only in academic theory but in civic education. Mises sees it as a demanding antidote to slogans about planning and capitalism, a work for readers willing to understand the market economy as a coherent order of human action.
It is certainly not easy reading and asks for the utmost exertion of one's attention.
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