More than thirty years ago F. A. Hayek said of Socialism: It was a work on political economy in the tradition of the great moral philosophers a Montesquieu or Adam Smith containing both acute knowledge and profound wisdom. . . . To none of us young men who read the book when it appeared was the world ever the same again. This is a newly annotated edition of the classic first published in German in 1922. It is the definitive refutation of nearly every type of socialism ever devised. Mises presents a wide-ranging analysis of society comparing the results of socialist planning with those of free-market capitalism in all areas of life. Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the leading spokesman of the Austrian School of economics throughout most of the twentieth century.