ABSTRACT
This chapter was first published as a paper by the Review of Austrian Economics in honor of the memory of Murray N.Rothbard. As I wrote it, my mind went back over 40 years, to the first time that I had met him. It was at the opening session of the Seminar in Economic Theory which Professor Mises conducted in the fall semester of 1954. That occasion was also my first meeting with Ludwig von Mises, and it is etched deeply in my memory. Two statements by Mises at that seminar meeting stand out in my recollection. One statement was his very opening substantive sentence that evening. “The market,” Mises began, “is a process.” (See also the statement in Human Action (1966, p. 257): “The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. The market is a process.”)
Coming as I did from a rather spotty undergraduate training in economics (and mainly along Keynesian lines), Mises’s statement, I recall, left me completely puzzled. I had thought of the market as a place, an arena for exchanges, as an abstract idea referring to voluntary exchange translations. I could not fathom what on earth could be meant by the observation that the market is a process. I now, in retrospect, consider that all my subsequent training and research in economics, both before and after obtaining my doctorate under Mises, has consisted in learning to appreciate what it was that Mises meant by this assertion.
