If Mises has an unheralded masterpiece, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science is it. There are two senses in which this book is indeed ultimate: it deals with the very core of economics as a science, and it is the last book that he wrote. For that reason, it is a real milestone in the history of the Misesian oeuvre that this book is newly available in this beautiful new hardbound edition.

If you have never read this book, you will be struck by the fiery and determine prose and the weightiness of the subject matter. When we set out to collect some of Mises's most pithy writing to put in The Quotable Mises, we found that this book was the most fruitful resource of all!

Also, the content reflects a lifetime of learning and his desire to make one last impassioned statement to save both economics and liberty from sure destruction at the hands of intellectual error.

If you know this work already, you will appreciate this beautiful new edition, which seems to elevate this work to the place it should be: right up there with Liberalism and Interventionism as scientific pillars of Misesian thought.

As his career was coming to a close, Mises saw that that fiercest battles over economic questions come down to issues of epistemology: how do we determine what is and what is not true in economics? How do we even know that economics is a valid science? What are the methods we should use in studying economics? What constitutes a true proposition and how do we know?

These questions matter because, as Mises says, the very future of freedom and civilization itself depend on economic science, the development and application of which was "the most spectacular event of modern history."

Between Mises's earliest writings on this subject and this book, two movements had taken hold: "scientific" planning in public policy, and positivism in the social sciences. Mises here battles both, first by showing how the two are related, and, second, by demolishing the basis of both. He shows that humans cannot be studied in the same way that we study the physical world. We are dealing with volitional beings whose choices make controlled experiments completely impossible.

And yet does that imply that a kind of chaos exists in economic theory, that we must throw up our hands and do nothing observe that all is in flux? Not at all, says Mises. There is a logical structure of the human mind that manifests itself in economic reality through strict laws of cause and effect. To understand economics is to see these laws as universal and inviolable.

To provide a flavor, here is Mises on the existence of causality:

No thinking and no acting would be possible to man if the universe were chaotic, i.e., if there were no regularity whatever in the succession and concatenation of events. In such a world of unlimited contingency nothing could be perceived but ceaseless kaleidoscopic change. There would be no possibility for man to expect anything. All experience would be merely historical, the record of what has happened in the past. No inference from past events to what might happen in the future would be permissible. Therefore man could not act. He could at best be a passive spectator and would not be able to make any arrangements for the future, be it only for the future of the impending instant. The first and basic achievement of thinking is the awareness of constant relations among the external phenomena that affect our senses. A bundle of events that are regularly related in a definite way to other events is called a specific thing and as such distinguished from other specific things…. Whatever philosophers may say about causality, the fact remains that no action could be performed by men not guided by it. Neither can we imagine a mind not aware of the nexus of cause and effect. In this sense we may speak of causality as a category or an a priori of thinking and acting.

This proposition cuts through the nonsense of Marxism (which postulated without evidence the existence of historical laws), Keynesianism (the economic laws of which were arbitrary), and positivism (which erred in importing methods from an unrelated field of study). That only scratches the surface of the extent of the ideologies confronted here. He also confronts those who claim the existence of "statistical laws," the advocates of primitivism, the apostles of polylogism, and pushers of panphysicalism, and the demogogues of determinism. Above all, he elevates the Misesian idea of praxeology—the science of action—as the starting point for all economic theory and historical understanding.

Of all the books in the Misesian library, this book is probably the most neglected. And unjustly so. He wrote it as a final defense of his theoretical work, and the reader is struck by the extent to which Mises complete that intellectual revolution that began in Austrian in the 1870s, when Carl Menger rediscovered the foundation of economic science in the understanding of acting, choosing human beings.

Mises ends his book with a conclusion that doesn't at all seem far-fetched after his blistering and impassioned examination of the subject at hand:

The outstanding fact about the contemporary ideological situation is that the most popular political doctrines aim at totalitarianism, the thorough abolition of the individual's freedom to choose and to act. No less remarkable is the fact that the most bigoted advocates of such a system of conformity call themselves scientists, logicians, and philosophers.

The contents of this volume include:

• Some Preliminary Observations Concerning Praxeology Instead of an Introduction
  • 1. The Permanent Substratum of Epistemology
  • 2. On Action
  • 3. On Economics
  • 4. The Starting Point of Praxeological Thinking
  • 5. The Reality of the External World
  • 6. Causality and Teleology
  • 7. The Category of Action
  • 8. The Sciences of Human Action

• I. The Human Mind
  • 1. The Logical Structure of the Human Mind
  • 2. A Hypothesis about the Origin of the A Priori Categories
  • 3. The A Priori Categories
  • 4. The A Priori
  • 5. Induction
  • 6. The Paradox of Probability Empiricism
  • 7. Materialism
  • 8. the Absurdity of any Materialistic Philosophy

• II. The Activistic Basis of Knowledge
  • 1. Man and Action
  • 2. Finality
  • 3. Valuation
  • 4. The Chimera of Unified Science
  • 5. The Two Branches of the Sciences of Human Action
  • 6. The Logical Character of Praxeology
  • 7. The Logical Character of History
  • 8. The Thymological Method

• III. Necessity and Volition
  • 1. The Infinite
  • 2. The Ultimate Given
  • 3. Statistics
  • 4. Free Will
  • 5. Inevitability

• IV. Certainty and Uncertainty
  • 1. The Problem of Quantitative Definiteness
  • 2. Certain Knowledge
  • 3. The Uncertainty of the Future
  • 4. Qualification and Understanding in Acting and History
  • 5. The Precariousness of Forecasting in Human Affairs
  • 6. Economic Prediction and the Trend Doctrine
  • 7. Decision-Making
  • 8. Confirmation and Refutability
  • 9. The Examination of Praxeological Theorems

• V. On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics
  • 1. The Research Fable
  • 2. The Study of Motives
  • 3. Theory and Practice
  • 4. The Pitfalls of Hypostatization
  • 5. On the Rejection of Methodological Individualism
  • 6. The Approach of Macroeconomics
  • 7. Reality and Play
  • 8. Misinterpretation of the Climate of Opinion
  • 9. The Belief in the Omnipotence of Thought
  • 10. The Concept of a Perfect System of Government
  • 11. The Behavioral Sciences

• VI. Further Implications of the Neglect of Economic Thinking
  • 1. The Zoological Approach to Human Problems
  • 2. The Approach of the "Social Sciences"
  • 3. The Approach of Economics
  • 4. A Remark about Legal Terminology
  • 5. The Sovereignty of the Consumers

• VII. The Epistemological Roots of Monism
  • 1. The Nonexperimental Character of Monism
  • 2. The Historical Setting of Positivism
  • 3. The Case of the Natural Sciences
  • 4. The Case of the Sciences of Human Action
  • 5. The Fallacies of Positivism

• VIII. Positivism and the Crisis of Western Civilization
  • 1. The Misinterpretation of the Universe
  • 2. The Misinterpretation of the Human Condition
  • 3. The Cult of Science
  • 4. The Epistemological Support of Totalitarianism
  • 5. The Consequences

• Endnotes