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NOTE 1.01. Fundamentals of Human Action: The Concept of Action

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Chapter 1. Fundamentals of Human Action

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1. The Concept of Action

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The distinctive and crucial feature in the study of man is the concept of action.

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Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior.

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It is therefore sharply distinguishable from those observed movements which, from the point of view of man, are not purposeful.

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These include all the observed movements of inorganic matter and those types of human behavior that are purely reflex, that are simply involuntary responses to certain stimuli.

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Human action, on the other hand, can be meaningfully interpreted by other men, for it is governed by a certain purpose that the actor has in view.

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The purpose of a man's act is his end.

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The desire to achieve this end is the man's motive for instituting the action.

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All human beings act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings.

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We could not conceive of human beings who do not act purposefully, who have no ends

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in view that they desire and attempt to attain.

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Things that did not act, that did not behave purposefully, would no longer be classified

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as Human.

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It is this fundamental truth, this axiom of human action, that forms the key to our study.

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The entire realm of praxeology and its best-developed subdivision, economics, is based on an analysis

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of the necessary logical implications of this concept.

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This chapter consists solely of a development of the logical implications of the existence

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of Human Action, Future Chapters, the further parts of the structure, are developed with

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the help of a very small number of subsidiary assumptions.

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The fact that men act by virtue of their being human is indisputable and incontrovertible.

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To assume the contrary would be an absurdity.

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The contrary, the absence of motivated behavior, would apply only to plants and inorganic matter.

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There is no need to enter here into the difficult problem of animal behavior, from the lower

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organisms to the higher primates, which might be considered as on a borderline between purely

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reflexive and motivated behavior.

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At any rate, men can understand, as distinguished from merely observe, such behavior, only insofar

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are as they can impute to the animals motives that they can understand.