There are two ways to read Mises’s great treatise. Most readers will, I fear, find the book too much to attempt to grasp systematically. Not everyone feels like reading a 900-page book straight through. If you shrink from a full confrontation with the book, you will, as I hope to show, miss out on a great deal. But all is not lost. You can open the book almost anywhere and come away with new insights. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/10629/human-action-the-scholars-edition/
Human Action, The Scholar’s Edition
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You didn’t mention that it’s also available in audio form (or about half of it is, as of today).
Wonderful review, of course, about what, in a better world, would be generally understood by intellectuals as a central masterpiece of classic nonfiction literature.
My bone to pick, as I noted on this blog some years ago, is that it’s misleading to call this “The Scholar’s Edition”. It’s simply the first edition’s text (plus a new introduction, written by others long after Mises’s death). The original text is otherwise out of print, having long since been supplanted by the third edition’s text. (The “fourth edition” marketed by another publisher is also misleading, as this is simply the third edition’s text, again with an introduction and new index created by others well after Mises’s death).
(To those already familiar with the history of _Human Action_: Please forgive my exposition for the benefit of novices.)
From the first to the third editions, Mises deleted and added some passages, though with the end result that both volumes had nearly the same page counts. (The second edition was rife with gross typographical errors, and, when the publisher at fault wouldn’t do the right thing by recalling it and reprinting it in corrected form, Mises took the text to another publisher — hence the “third edition”.)
My idea for a true scholar’s edition would incorporate the textual variations of both the first and third editions. Color-coding or varying fonts could be used to distinguish passages unique to the first and third editions and also indicate passages in common (the latter constituting the great bulk of the text).
It should also be noted that _Human Action_’s first edition is, in its own right, something of a revision and self-translation of Mises’s earlier German-language book, _Nationalökonomie_. Though I don’t know the German language myself, it’s well known that this text covers much more in the realm of German-language economic and intellectual history. (And, just thumbing through the third edition right know, I see there’s a footnote on p. 488 by Mises that says, “For a detailed critical analysis of this part of Böhm-Bawerk’s reasoning the reader is referred to Mises, _Nationalökonomie_, pp. 439–442.”) For the benefit of scholarly minded readers who don’t know German, perhaps the Mises Institute should consider for someday a translation of that. (Not necessarily such a daunting editorial task, as it’s clear that much of the text could be directly adapted from Mises’s own English-language _Human Action_.) Or, barring that, that translations of passages from _Nationalökonomie_ substantively different from _Human Action_ could be incorporated into my suggestion of textual conflation of the first and third editions of _Human Action_. (Or simply included in the latter’s endnotes.)
In short, there’s much that could be done to serve scholarship into Ludwig von Mises, the greatest and most underrated social scientist of the twentieth century. Reprinting the first edition of his most ambitious work — very worthwhile in its own right — and re-subtitling it “The Scholar’s Edition” hardly does that aim justice.
I actually wish they had reset it, so that it was in more current font. The pages are facsimile from the 1949 edition as far as I can tell, and, besides small flaws from the printing technology back then, the font itself is distractingly outdated to me. The introduction by Salerno and company is in a more modern font and also printed I suppose from a word processor or some digital format, and just reads so much easier. I see the value in preserving the original pagination, but I would rather the text be reset to be like the introduction. Anyone else notice this?
That’s my only criticism of it, though!
matt,
I’m sure the reasons that the LvMI didn’t reset it were that it would’ve cost much more to have someone transcribe the text (bearing in mind that the original text wouldn’t have been already available on a word-processed text), plus there’s the great risk, in a work this long, of introducing new typographical errors. (The original text is remarkably free of such errors, apparently having undergone stringent proofreading before going to press).
The publisher of “The Scholar’s Edition” argues that scholars need a text conforming with the original pagination. Fair enough. In coming up with the kind of conflated text which I propose, there’s an easy way around this, though it may seem obtrusive to the more casual reader:
Use vertical bars in the text to indicate the change to a new page. To make up an example, suppose the first and third editions broke the same sentence at different junctures:
“I think that I shall never |1st, p. 289| see a poem lovely |3rd, p. 288| as a tree.” Or:
“The hills are alive |1st & 3rd, p. 310| with the sound of music.”
Of course, these indicators would actually be color-coded or be assigned fonts showing which of, or if both, editions are being referred to (as with the variants in the texts themselves), so, if you imagine the colors or fonts, the text would literally read more like this:
“I think that I shall never |289| see a poem lovely |288| as a tree.” “The hills are alive |310| with the sound of music.”
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