Sublime

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.

For these few already all show one thing: that the spirit of hard work, of progress, or whatever else it may be called, the awakening of which one is inclined to ascribe to Protestantism, must not be understood, as there is a tendency to do, as joy of living nor in any other sense as connected with the Enlightenment.

In his magnum opus Human Action, Mises constructs a brilliant vision of how people can best live and work together. He begins by building on the answers to basic questions such as “How do we know things?” and “How do we know what’s true and what’s right?”

From the standpoint of Ely and the new generation economists, economic analysis and its application made up an inherently ethical task whose basic unit of analysis was the social whole. In this sense, their pronouncements were not socialist in a Marxist sense—that is, implying public ownership of capital and the ultimate displacement of capitalism—

In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudæmonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture.

He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irrational sense of having done his job well.

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production whic

The moral conduct of the average man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic character and subjected to a consistent method for conduct as a whole.

The form of organization was in every respect capitalistic; the entrepreneur’s activity was of a purely business character; the use of capital, turned over in the business, was indispensable; and finally, the objective aspect of the economic process, the book-keeping, was rational. But it was traditionalistic business, if one considers the spirit w