Volume 12, Number 4 (2009)
The author believes the evidence presented in this paper raises serious questions for Kirzner’s interpretation of Robbins’s Essay. Mises certainly treated Robbins’s book as an important contribution to the science of human action and did not draw a distinction between the Robbins’s economizing man and his own concept of the purposive actor. Furthermore, contrary to Kirzner’s claim, the economizing framework, at least as Robbins understood and applied it, does not ineluctably lead to a static theory of the market. In fact Robbins’s remarks on theoretical issues that are scattered throughout the Essay reveal a conception of the market that is dramatically dynamic and process-oriented.
