1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Georges Sorel, alone among the thinkers who absorbed Marx, added something genuinely new: a cult of action, sabotage, the general strike, and political myth that would echo through Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler alike. From that observation these lectures range across the fault lines Marx left unexamined - above all the principle of nationality, which Marx dismissed because he expected capitalism to dissolve national peculiarities before socialism arrived. Mises shows why free-trade optimism about the obsolescence of war, shared by Wilson and Norman Angell, collapses in an interventionist world of tariffs, embargoes, and raw-material controls. He follows the shifting vocabulary of socialism and communism from the 1830s through Lenin and Stalin, and reads the First and Second Internationals as bureaucracies that preached peace while ignoring the trade and migration barriers that actually make nations fight.
Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler were all influenced by Sorel, by the idea of action, by the idea not to talk but to kill.
Profit and loss are signals before they are rewards: in a market economy they reveal what consumers most urgently want and pull capital toward the uses that serve them best. Working from that premise, Mises separates the physical capital goods inherited from the past - often specific, obsolete, or badly located - from the accounting abstraction of capital, and shows why technocratic schemes to scrap old methods for newer ones squander real wealth. Private property, on his account, is a social function, retained only by serving customers cheaply and well, and wholly unlike feudal ownership rooted in conquest and privilege. Taxation and interference, he warns, sap consumer sovereignty by starving new firms of the capital they need to grow. The essay closes by contrasting profit-and-loss management with the bureaucratic kind proper only to policing and other nonmarket services.
But capitalism is not dying; people are murdering it.
No civilization rises without saving - the patient accumulation of capital and the monetary calculation that lets a society know whether it is preserving its stock or consuming it. That is the thread Mises follows here, distinguishing the physical capital goods of production from the accounting concept of capital, and insisting that profit, income, and capital maintenance have meaning only inside a price system. Socialism, denied market prices, cannot make the reckoning at all. He turns his fire on the income-tax laws, inflation, and social-security schemes that quietly erode capital formation, and on the anti-saving and Keynesian doctrines that treat thrift as a danger and dread technological unemployment. More capital, he answers, means higher labor productivity and higher wages - the true engine by which the lives of ordinary workers were transformed.
If the children used up the nets and fish produced by their parents, capital accumulation would have had to start all over again.
Strip profit and loss from the market, Mises argues, and production loses its only compass - the point this 1951 pamphlet drives home. Profit, he explains, is no arbitrary surcharge but the reward for anticipating future prices better than one's rivals and correcting the market's maladjustments, while loss is the penalty for judging wrong; under perfect foresight neither could exist. He then meets the moral condemnation of profit head on, rebutting the slogan of production for use and not for profit, the schemes to abolish or cap entrepreneurial gains, and the demand for equality, which he treats as envy in the guise of justice. The alternative to consumer-directed enterprise, he warns, is not a gentler middle way but socialism - and with it the erosion of representative government and civil liberty.
The consumers by their buying and abstention from buying elect the entrepreneurs in a daily repeated plebiscite as it were.
Over twelve days in 1951, at the Foundation for Economic Education, Mises reconstructed his whole system aloud — from the epistemology of human action to Marxism, money, and the trade cycle — in lectures transcribed verbatim and offered here in a German translation of the 2004 English edition. The free market, he argues, is a rational order of purposeful action, prices, and monetary discipline; its enemies are pseudo-sciences that promise social control while ignoring calculation and scarcity. Economics is a science of action, not an experimental discipline, and it stays neutral about ultimate ends. Socialism fails not merely as coercion but as an intellectual impossibility: abolishing private ownership abolishes the prices planners would need. Inflation he defines causally, as an expansion of money outrunning the demand for cash balances, and the gold standard he defends as a curb on political manipulation.
Was sie wirklich brauchen, ist das Kapital. Was fehlt, ist der Kapitalismus.
English translation: “What they really need is capital. What is lacking is capitalism.”
Long after Böhm-Bawerk had dismantled Marx's economics, Marxism kept its prestige — and this lecture-essay asks why a doctrine attacking the whole social order went so long unrefuted as philosophy. The answer, Mises argues, lies in its unexamined core: historical inevitability, the malleability of man, and the mysterious 'material productive forces' that supposedly explain all culture yet are themselves never explained. He separates anti-Marxism from liberalism, defends Freud against the charge of materialism, and traces the vocabulary of 'organization' and 'social engineering' back to Comte and Saint-Simon, where human beings become raw material to be arranged. Against the planners he reframes the whole quarrel: not plan versus no plan, but whose plan shall rule — one dictator's, or the many plans of individuals who each, in acting, already plan.
It is impossible to defeat a philosophy if you do not fight in the philosophical field.
Interest is not a fee charged for the use of money, but the market expression of a universal fact: present goods are valued above future goods. From this rooting of interest in time preference, Mises builds a theory of the trade cycle in which depressions trace not to capitalism's inner laws but to bank credit expansion. New credit lowers the market rate below what real saving would set, luring entrepreneurs into projects that falsified calculation makes look profitable; the boom is malinvestment, and the crisis merely discloses the scarcity that was there all along. His house-building analogy — foundations laid for a structure the available materials cannot complete — fixes the point. Credit expansion, he adds, lets governments spend without openly taxing, which is why sound money is finally a matter of limiting political power.
Credit expansion is fundamentally really a problem of civil rights.