Property rights, once at the heart of classical economic orthodoxy, have been all but disregarded by today's economists. As property (respect for it and expressed consent) is widely considered a necessary condition for peace and prosperity, it deserves much more attention from our current profession. In Property, Social Action and the Legal-Economic Nexus, Josef Sima seeks to address this failing.

Sima shows that although the concept of property has been a focal point of the discipline of law and economics--in the work of Coase, Posner, and Calabresi--the role it has played is fundamentally problematic, and that a more meaningful and relevant theory of property, one that both reinstates it as a condition of a flourishing life and one that strengthens the law and economics approach, can be found in the writings of Carl Menger. Indeed, Sima argues that Menger's work provided a vision of a unifying approach to law and economics--the "logic of social action"--that has been elaborated systematically by other scholars working in the Austrian tradition.

The book adds a significant contribution to this scholarship on the nature and implications of private property and explains how the concept is linked to coordinating and order-producing qualities of societies. In particular, the book shows the importance of entrepreneurially-driven social order and challenges the mainstream view that monopolistic structures and legal centralism are necessary parts of a society's legal-economic nexus. It offers new ways of thinking about the concepts of scarcity, efficiency, choice, rights, and added value, and is an important corrective to the failure of much of economics to provide an economic analysis of property and to deal with real-life issues.

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