Economic Calculation in Socialist Regime

Author: Ludwig Von Mises
Pages: 48

This publication by the young Mises has considerable historical importance. If it was to give a foretaste of the great work on Socialism that he was preparing and which would appear two years later, the Austrian economist delivered there something other than a text of circumstance or a quick sketch: his brochure developed in depth a question of principle, that of the possibility or impossibility of an economic regime where private ownership of the means of production was abolished. For such was, at that time, the fundamental demand of the Marxists and communists who, after the Russian Revolution, had found a nation on which to base their experiments. Mises had no need for the Soviet socialist regime to decline and collapse to demonstrate the theoretical flaws of communism. He did so in this famous brochure of 1920, which the Coppet Institute is making available to the French public, after decades of unavailability.