Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

IT GIVES me great satisfaction to see this book, handsomely printed by a distinguished publishing house, appear in its third revised edition.

Two terminological remarks may be in order.

First, I employ the term "liberal" in the sense attached to it everywhere in the nineteenth century and still today in the countries of continental Europe. This usage is imperative because there is simply no other term available to signify the great political and intellectual movement that substituted free enterprise and the market economy for the precapitalistic methods of production; constitutional representative government for the absolutism of kings or oligarchies; and freedom of all individuals for slavery, serfdom, and other forms of bondage.... [From the Forward to the Third Edition]