"THE STRAIT JACKET OF BUREAUCRATIC ORGANIZATION PARALYZES THE INDIVIDUAL'S INITIATIVE": VON MISES' BUREAUCRACY

MISES, Ludwig von. Bureaucracy. London: William Hodge, 1945. Octavo, original beige cloth, original dust jacket. $2200.

First English edition of the renowned economist's nearly "epoch-making" analysis of bureaucracy and its impact within competing systems of socialism and capitalism, issued just one year after the New York first, in original dust jacket.

In this work, Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises discusses bureaucracy and bureacratic methods. While Mises contends that bureaucracy is morally neutral, he argues that it must be confined to sectors such as civic government. He fights against the notion that it is appropriate within areas such as economics due to its ability to stifle the sort of initiative that thrives in a capitalist system. In essence, Mises argues that bureaucracy within economics is fundamentally undemocratic. "[T]he main thesis of Professor von Mises is that bureaucracy is merely a symptom of the real disease with which we have to deal. That disease is excessive State domination and control… Published on the day after F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Professor von Mises' Bureaucracy once more calls attention to the ironic fact that the most eminent and uncompromising of defenders of English liberty, and the system of free enterprise, which reached its highest development in America, should now be two Austrian exiles" (Hazlitt, New York Times). "Judged by any standard of excellence, this is a terrific little book. So brilliantly written and close-knit is the development of the thesis that a reviewer finds himself marking nearly every paragraph for possible quotation, while hoping at the same time to achieve the impossible feat of condensing the whole into a column or two of summary… [M]ay conceivably be an epoch-making piece of work" (ABA Journal). First published by Yale University Press in 1944.

Book fine, dust jacket with small smudge to front wrapper and only minor rubbing to extremities. A near-fine copy.