A fine association copy, from the library of Hugh Dalton (1887-1962), the British chancellor of the exchequer from 1945 to 1947 under Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour government, with his elegant ownership inscription to the front free endpaper.
Hugh Dalton was a major figure at the London School of Economics during the 1920s and early 1930s, having been appointed Sir Ernest Cassel Reader in Economics in 1920. Dalton had a particular influence on the early career development of Lionel Robbins, who had in turn played a key role in producing the present English translation of Mises’s Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel, recruiting his student Harold Batson as translator and producing his own new introduction to accompany the text.
Dalton would later describe Robbins in his memoirs as ‘an addict of the Mises-Hayek anti-socialist theme. Socialism, they said, was not so much and as impossible; so “irrational” that there was nothing to discuss; under socialism there could be no “calculation”. I could not succeed in persuading Robbins that it was even interesting to enquire how the Planned Economy of the Soviet Union actually worked’ (Dalton, Call Back Yesterday: Memoirs 1887-1931, p. 116).
A satisfying association, traversing the Fabian roots of the London School of Economics through to the Austrian-influence of the School’s economics department under Lionel Robbins during the 1930s.
Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit offers ‘a detailed sophisticated explanation of the quantity theory of money based on the subjective, marginal utility theory. It explains money’s origin, the development and nature of banking, the cause and consequences of inflation and credit expansion, the differences in the value of different moneys, as well as the reason for ‘cyclical’ economic fluctuations’ (Greaves and McGee). Moreover, the work’s emphasis on the logic of rational individual action and the value of maintaining a gold standard free from government manipulation offered an important alternative to the dominant trends in economic thought and practice at the time. ‘Professor Mises shows here how mistaken monetary policies lead to the destruction of liberty’ (Hazlitt, The Free Man’s Library, pp. 119-20).
Greaves and McGee, B-2.
