Socialism
An Economic and Sociological Analysis

Orig. reviewed 2009, with many edits since. This is the edition that I originally read first, in 1977. But there are many good editions since. I have reread the book many times since, but not always this edition. Sometimes my "rereads" were actually "listens" to the audio version by Blackstone Books,......more

Written between WWI and WWII, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis is interesting as a historical document. He correctly predicts many of the difficulties the Communist regimes would face. However, von Mises loses me when he seeks to justify the Opium War. Even in the 1920s, the absurdit......more

I've yet to meet a person who advocated socialism after reading this book. For a shorter critique of the problems of calculation, Mises also wrote "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth", which is also quite good, but significantly shorter.......more

Suffers a bit from Lord of the Rings syndrome. Reading Tolkein now can be weird, because a lot of LotR can seem cliche or common- but that's because LotR was the progenitor of the tropes that now seem overly familiar. It is a victim of its own success. Likewise some of the stuff in the beginning of......more

Perhaps no one in the 20th century provided a more systematic defense of the free market than Ludwig von Mises. The scope of his writings was broad; his analysis incisive. In this book, Von Mises undertakes the tasks of describing socialism and its implication for economics and the broader culture. H......more