Turns out I misquoted Mises too (spelling mistake). Mises spelled it ‘behavior’ not ‘behaviour’. That means I typed out the quote instead of copy/pasting it. That’s unnecessary when I have a digital copy. I’ll definitely keep an eye out for that.
Another thing. Since it’s the first sentence of a chapter, the first word is all capitalised. I de-capitalised it. Would de-capitalising the word mean misquoting?
Here is what Mises wrote copy/pasted from my kindle version:
HUMAN action is purposeful behavior.
Yeah I read them as quotes too, but realised it was kind of ambiguous as to whether he was just paraphrasing and using italics to emphasise the phrase.
I didn’t, so I did!
So Friedman said:
I start by defining economics as that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them, the third paragraph of Chapter 1 of my Price Theory.
And the third paragraph of Chapter 1 of D. Friedman’s Price Theory (bold added):
Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that people have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them.
He misquoted himself when he used the word ‘individuals’ and not ‘people’.
I also checked Rothbard’s book. Rothbard says in the first paragraph of Chapter 1 of Man, Economy, and State:
Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior.
I think this is a different idea to Mises’ idea. But Rothbard doesn’t seem to indicate or imply that he is quoting Mises, so I don’t think he is misquoting Mises. He uses the word ‘purposeful’ like Mises does and not ‘purposive’.
There is a reference to Mises in a footnote to the title of Chapter 1, The Fundamentals of Human Action, which says:
For further reading on this topic, the best source is the epochal work of Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 1–143, and passim.
But I don’t think this amounts to an implication that Rothbard is quoting Mises.
So I don’t think Rothbard misquoted Mises. But is Friedman misquoting Rothbard? Does Friedman imply that Rothbard said “Human action is purposive behavior”, like Friedman implies that Mises said it? This I’m not sure on. I can read them as quotes in italics, but I can also read it as being like: Rothbard starts with the idea from Mises that X (in which X is a paraphrase of the idea of Mises). But I think Friedman would be misquoting Mises when he identifies X as a certain sentence in Mises’ book.
Wait but if it’s a quote because of what he says about it being a Mises sentence, then it’s a quote for what he says about Rothbard right? It can’t be a quote for one guy and a paraphrase for the other, right?