My Years with Ludwig von Mises.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

Davidson wrote to Lu: "Both George Day [George Parmly Day,
chairman of the board] and Norman Donaldson were delighted to
hear that you thought well of the idea of going,ahead with the book
on bureaucracy....n And on March 3 he wrote again: "I'm delighted
to be able to tell you that our Committee has been glad to
approve our commissioning the book on bureaucracy.... We all
look forward to the successful outcome of this new venture. n
On
June 2, 1944, Davidson could acknowledge receipt of the manuscript
and wrote: "The manuscript seems fine to me, in fact I think
we have quite a book here.... I wanted to get this word of my own
enthusiasm for the new child off to you as quickly as possible. n
Omnipotent Government and Bureaucracy were the first books
Lu had written in English, and the public response and the reviews
were excellent. But these two books were only the beginning
of the immense output of his writing in the United States. From
the beginning he was determined to revise Nationaloekonomie for
an English-speaking public. In December, 1944, he sent Davidson
thefollowing summary of Nationaloekonomie:
My objective in writing the treatise Nationaloekonomie, Theorie
des Handelns und Wirtschaftens, was to provide a comprehensive
theory of economic behavior which would include not only the economics
of a market economy (free-enterprise system) but no less the
economics of any other thinkable system of social cooperation, viz.,
socialism, interventionism, corporativism and so on. Furthermore I
deemed it necessary to deal with all those objections which from
various points of view-for instance: of ethics, psychology, history,
anthropology, ethnography, biology-have been raised against the
soundness of economic reasoning and the validity of the methods
hitherto applied by the economists of all schools and lines of
thought. Only such an ~xhaustivetreatment of all critical objections
can satisfy the exacting reader and convince him that economics is a
science both conveying knowledge and able to guide conduct.
The book starts accordingly from a general theory of human action
of which the behavior commonly called "economic" is only a special
case. It analyzes the fundamental epistemological problems of the
social sciences and determines the role assigned in their framework
to economics. On the basis of these more general investigations it
then proceeds to a thorough treatment of all problems of economics.
The English-language edition will not simply be a translation of
the book published in Geneva in 1940 in German language. Besides
the revision of the whole text which will involve entirely rewriting
some chapters, other important changes seem to be necessary in order
to adapt the book better to the intellectual climate of America. In
fact an American reader approaches the economic problems from
another angle than the German reader who is more or less under the
spell of Hegelianism, the Nazi philosophy and other isms, fortunately
less popular in this country. It is, for instance, superfluous in
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