17. A Treatise on Economics

NATIONALÖKONOMIE CAME OFF THE press in May 1940, just in time to survive the collapse of its publisher, only to be buried under the avalanche of the war. Many of the copies Mises sent to friends and colleagues never reached their destinations. Mises took it with some humor: “I suppose the Nazis used them as fuel.”¹

The book survived only because its English-language successor, Human Action, drew incomparably more attention from readers all over the world. But it was in Nationalökonomie that Mises first presented the entire system of thought that he had developed during more than thirty years of intense study² The typical economics textbook was, then as now, just an amalgamation of incompatible bits of theory. Mises's treatise presented social laws as one coherent whole, and it drew an encompassing picture of social reality in a step-by-step manner, moving from the most general phenomena to the most specific. It was social philosophy in the best sense.

Mises understood the importance of a full treatise. A book of smaller scope and size could not put the various ideas in context. Mises had to educate his readers before he could convince them—an essential task in the age of interventionism, in which the average citizen was constantly exposed to pro-government propaganda. Replying to a reader he once said:

I tried to answer the questions you are asking me in my books. A book is, in fact, a letter written to all one's friends, to those the author has already acquired as well as to those he hopes to acquire in the future.³

But Mises did not have exaggerated confidence in the power of the written word. In a 1957 letter to a friend from Mexico, he expressed his wish to discuss very soon the theoretical problems that this friend had raised in his previous letter. A personal meeting would be necessary because a thorough discussion of those problems “can, in writing, only be done in the form of a book. And the written word can never replace the spoken word.”⁴