What is the difference between Human Action and Man, Economy, and State?
Which one should I read first?
Human Action is much more philosophical and covers some history as well. Not knocking on Mises, but due to the order of the book and some of the words he uses it can be very hard comprehending what hes trying to explain.
MES was meant to be a textbook form of Human Action but just grew into its own book. It coves economics much more and leaves history/philosophy to the footnotes and other rothbard books (compared to HA). You’ll learn economics much better by Rothbard, hes clear, concise, and lays down things in a relatively nice format. Mises kinda took some things for granted and didn’t really explain them to the reader.
Go with MES first.
I actually think reading both at the same time might be a good idea now.
After reading MES recently, and currently reading Human Action, I would recommend you also read Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market first, as there is much in Human Action that I would have a much more difficult time with if I hadn’t have MES in my background.
The two books present their own distinctive challenges. It just depends on what kind of challenges you are more up for.
With Human Action, you have to be willing to look unfamiliar things up, which is usually as simple as typing the unfamiliar term or phrase along with site:mises.org into Google, and reading what you find.
With MES, you have to be willing to sit with diagrams and the complicated thought experiments they represent, and study them until they make sense.
With MES, you don’t need to look things up, but with Human Action, the thought experiments presented don’t take nearly as much processing.
In a way, my background with Human Action, has made a lot more critical when analysing Rothbard’s use of diagrams, while also being hugely appreciative of many of the gaps he filled. While being unnapreciated for his originality(probably because he cites his references well), Rothbard I fell is a marvellous synthesizer.