Human Action more relevant than ever

An extract from Lew Rockwell’s 1999 address to the Mises Institute upon the unveiling of Human Action – Scholars Edition, 50 years after the original publication of Human Action, written by Luwig von Mises.

One of the great rhetorical errors of Mises’s time and ours has been to reverse the meaning of public and private service. As Murray Rothbard pointed out, private service implies that your behavior and your motivation is about helping no one but yourself. If you want an example, tour the halls of a random bureaucratic palace in DC.

Public service, on the other hand, implies a voluntary sacrifice of our own interests for the sake of others, and I suggest to you that this the most overlooked feature of a free society. Whether it is entrepreneurs serving their customers, parents serving their children, teachers serving their students, pastors serving the faithful, or intellectuals serving the cause of truth and wisdom, we find an authentic public ethic and a real broadness of judgement; it is in the voluntary nexus of human action where we find the call of duty being acted on. It is here we find people standing up for their beliefs. It is here we find true idealism.

It was Mises’s firm conviction that ideas, and ideas alone, can bring about a change in the course of history. It is for this reason that he was able to complete his great book and live a heroic life despite every attempt to silence him.

Read Rockwell’s full speech here and find out why, like most great texts, the influence of Human Action is increasing with age.