Ludwig von Mises, Preface to the New Edition

Ludwig von Mises’s authorial preface, originally published in 1951 and republished in the supplied 1962 edition, frames his book around the choice between socialism and the market economy. Signed in New York in July 1950, it proceeds from a provocative diagnosis of contemporary politics to a restatement of the book’s central issue, then briefly directs readers to further treatments. Its purpose is to establish the continuing urgency of the argument despite the wars and revolutions separating successive editions.

Mises begins by challenging the apparent opposition between Communists and anti-Communists. Beneath their hostile rhetoric, he claims, both camps pursue the abolition of private enterprise and private ownership of productive resources. This sweeping identification is his polemical premise, not a conclusion demonstrated through detailed comparisons within the preface. He defines their alleged common destination through the displacement of consumer choice by centralized command:

No longer should individuals by their buying or abstention from buying determine what is to be produced and in what quantity and quality. Henceforth the government's unique plan alone should settle all these matters.

The contrast makes purchasing and abstention from purchasing the means by which individuals direct production. Planning transfers that authority to government. Mises consequently presents the economic change as a transformation of personal status: the paternal protection promised by the welfare state would, he argues, turn people into dependent workers obliged to obey the planning authority. Economic control and political subjection become inseparable in his account.

He extends this interpretation to self-described progressives, Italian Fascists, German Nazis, and Peron’s Argentina. Their different political identities are subordinated to what he regards as their shared drive toward comprehensive economic regimentation. His comparison of Peronism with the New Deal and Fair Deal is explicitly predictive: these programmes will culminate in full socialism unless stopped. The preface offers this warning without developing the institutional steps through which that outcome would occur.

These comparisons prepare his central distinction between rivalry within totalitarian politics and disagreement over the organization of society itself:

The real issue is not who should run the totalitarian apparatus. The real problem is whether or not socialism should supplant the market economy.

Mises thus asks readers to judge political movements by their relationship to private ownership and market coordination, rather than by their declared enemies. This is the preface’s defining conceptual move: it recasts the visible conflict between political camps as secondary to a more fundamental institutional choice.

The conclusion maintains that historical catastrophe has not altered that choice. Mises presents the struggle as one involving freedom, prosperity, and civilization, giving the book’s economic argument an explicitly moral and political significance. He assigns discussion of recent events to the book’s epilogue and points to Omnipotent Government, Bureaucracy, and Human Action for fuller analysis. The preface therefore supplies an interpretive frame and a renewed statement of stakes, while directing readers elsewhere for the extended argument.