On Delightful Studies... And A Giant

Samuel McChord Crothers wrote that “the scholar in politics breathes the still air of delightful studies.”

I can speak of many of my private studies that have provided me great delight, beginning with Frederic Bastiat, but I must confess that the most delightful of them all has been Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action: A Treatise on Economics.

Note I say that my “study” was “delightful”; indeed, exceptionally so. And it is the word “study” that lies at the root of the word “student.” All that students are supposed to do is study. If you are a student of economics, management or accounting, I recommend that you make a private study of Mises’ Human Action. The book is a masterpiece that demolishes everything mainstream economics stands for. It establishes a new science of economics based on rock-solid epistemological principles: apriorism, subjectivism, and individualism. There is no mathematics. There are no pictorial diagrams. This is what he himself called "logical economics." So take a print out, pick up a highlighter, have an excellent dictionary handy - and study, with great delight!

What a giant the man was!

Ludwig von Mises’ words below, from a chapter in Human Action on “The Role of Ideas,” offers us much to ponder on, as it concerns something we rarely think about, viz., thinking.

So do read it carefully – and think over each sentence.

It is always the individual who thinks. Society does not think any more than it eats or drinks. The evolution of human reasoning from the naive thinking of primitive man to the more subtle thinking of modern science took place within society. However, thinking itself is always an achievement of individuals. There is joint action, but no joint thinking. There is only tradition which preserves thoughts and communicates them to others as a stimulus to their thinking.

However, man has no means of appropriating the thoughts of his precursors other than to think them over again. Then, of course, he is in a position to proceed farther on the basis of his forerunners’ thoughts. The foremost vehicle of tradition is the word. Thinking is linked up with language and vice versa. Concepts are embodied in terms. Language is a tool of thinking as it is a tool of social action.

The history of thought and ideas is a discourse carried on from generation to generation. The thinking of later ages grows out of the thinking of earlier ages. Without the aid of this stimulation intellectual progress would have been impossible. The continuity of human evolution, sowing for the offspring and harvesting on land cleared and tilled by the ancestors, manifests itself also in the history of science and ideas. We have inherited from our forefathers not only a stock of products of various orders of goods which is the source of our material wealth; we have no less inherited ideas and thoughts, theories and technologies to which our thinking owes its productivity. But thinking is always a manifestation of individuals.

(From Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action, 4th Edition, Chapter IX, “The Role of Ideas”, pp. 177-178, pdf file here.)

The sentence that I would like to emphasize today is this:

However, man has no means of appropriating the thoughts of his precursors other than to think them over again.

Yes, Mises has gone, and we have no other means of keeping his contributions to our thoughts alive other than by reading his books and thinking his thoughts all over again; making them a vital part of our “mental furniture.”

This is a task for individuals. There is no “collective thinking.”

As I started off saying, Mises was a giant.

If you master his books, you can aspire to be a giant too.