In 1927, classical liberalism-based on a belief in individualism, reason, capitalism, and free trade-was dying, when among the twentieth century’s very best social thinkers wrote this combative and convincing restatement. Nowhere will be the key principles of Mises’ school of thought better displayed than in this timeless work.

Mises was a careful and logical theoretician who also believed that suggestions rule the globe, which especially comes to light in Liberalism. “The ultimate outcome of the struggle” between liberalism and totalitarianism, say Mises, “will never be determined by hands, but by suggestions. It is concepts that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons to their hands, which determine against whom as well as for whom the weapons shall be utilized. It really is they by itself, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, switch the scales.”