Epistemological Problems of Economics. Людвиг фон Мизес

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СКАЧАТЬ collected several of his lectures and papers on the theory of knowledge, i.e., epistemology, wrote a new introductory paper on “The Task and Scope of the Science of Human Action,” and published this volume, Epistemological Problems of Economics (German original, Grundprobleme der Nationalökonomie, 1933).

      The “epistemological problem,” as he saw it, was the prevailing opinion that the historical method was the only way to study economics. His purpose in compiling Epistemological Problems of Economics was to explain the epistemology of the sciences of human action, or economics. Economics was not history; it was a science of reason and logic. It concerned the actions of individuals cooperating, competing,

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      and exchanging with one another. And it explained how the market, trade, money, prices, and other economic factors developed and brought about today’s modern, complex market economy. “[E]conomics provides us with universally valid knowledge” (p. 6). “Our science . . . considers only the essential. Its goal is the comprehension of the universal, and its procedure is formal and axiomatic. It views action and the conditions under which action takes place . . . as formal constructions that enable us to grasp the patterns of human action in their purity” (p. 12).

      The future is separated from the past by the present, an infinitesimal instant between the past and the future. No one can know or predict the future. But it is possible to make some predictions, qualitative, not quantitative, in the field of economics on the basis of the principles and laws derived from the regularity in the sequence and concatenation of economic (market) phenomena. “When men realized that the phenomena of the market conform to laws, they began to develop catallactics, the theory of the market and the theory of exchange, which constitutes the heart of economics. After the theory of the division of labor was elaborated, Ricardo’s law of association enabled men to grasp its nature and significance, and thereby the nature and significance of the formation of society. . . . The discoveries made by Hume, Smith, Ricardo, Bentham, and many others may be regarded as constituting the historical beginning and foundation of a truly scientific knowledge of society” (p. 4).

      This volume represents Mises’s early attempt to describe the science of human action. He later expanded this explanation in his German-language Nationalökonomie (1940) and still later and in greater detail in English as Human Action (1949). But the germs of the theory of human action are contained herewith. Here he points out that the science of economics “is a priori, not empirical. Like logic and mathematics, it is not derived from experience; it is prior to experience. It is, as it were, the logic of action and deed” (p. 12). “As thinking and acting men, we grasp the concept of action. In grasping this concept we simultaneously grasp the closely correlated concepts of value, wealth, exchange, price, and cost. They are all necessarily implied in the concept of action, and together with them the concepts of valuing, scale of value and importance, scarcity and abundance, advantage and disadvantage, success, profit, and loss” (p. 21).

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      This book’s main contribution is in explaining that economics is “the science of human action that strives for universally valid knowledge.” The science of human action is economic theory; it is not a history of economic phenomena.

      Bettina Bien Greaves

       April 2012

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PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH-LANGUAGE EDITION

      The popular epistemological doctrines of our age do not admit that a fundamental difference prevails between the realm of events that the natural sciences investigate and the domain of human action that is the subject matter of economics and history. People nurture some confused ideas about a “unified science” that would have to study the behavior of human beings according to the methods Newtonian physics resorts to in the study of mass and motion. On the basis of this allegedly “positive” approach to the problems of mankind, they plan to develop “social engineering,” a new technique that would enable the “economic tsar” of the planned society of the future to deal with living men in the way technology enables the engineer to deal with inanimate materials.

      These doctrines misrepresent entirely every aspect of the sciences of human action.

      As far as man can see, there prevails a regularity in the succession and concatenation of natural phenomena. Experience, especially that of experiments performed in the laboratory, makes it possible for man to discern some of the “laws” of this regularity in many fields even with approximate quantitative accuracy. These experimentally established facts are the material that the natural sciences employ in building their theories. A theory is rejected if it contradicts the facts of experience. The natural sciences do not know anything about design and final causes.

      Human action invariably aims at the attainment of ends chosen. Acting man is intent upon diverting the course of affairs by purposeful conduct from the lines it would take if he were not to interfere. He wants to substitute a state of affairs that suits him better for one that suits him less. He chooses ends and means. These choices are directed by ideas.

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      The objects of the natural sciences react to stimuli according to regular patterns. No such regularity, as far as man can see, determines the reaction of man to various stimuli. Ideas are frequently, but not always, the reaction of an individual to a stimulation provided by his natural environment. But even such reactions are not uniform. Different individuals, and the same individual at various periods of his life, react to the same stimulus in a different way.

      As there is no discernible regularity in the emergence and concatenation of ideas and judgments of value, and therefore also not in the succession and concatenation of human acts, the role that experience plays in the study of human action is radically different from that which it plays in the natural sciences. Experience of human action is history. Historical experience does not provide facts that could render in the construction of a theoretical science services that could be compared to those which laboratory experiments and observation render to physics. Historical events are always the joint effect of the cooperation of various factors and chains of causation. In matters of human action no experiments can be performed. History needs to be interpreted by theoretical insight gained previously from other sources.

      This is valid also for the field of economic action. The specific experience with which economics and economic statistics are concerned always refers to the past. It is history, and as such does not provide knowledge about a regularity that will manifest itself also in the future. What acting man wants to know is theory, that is, cognition of the regularity in the necessary succession and concatenation of what is commonly called economic events. He wants to know the “laws” of economics in order to choose means that are fit to attain the ends sought.

      Such a science of human action cannot be elaborated either by recourse to the methods praised—but never practically resorted to—by the doctrines of logical positivism, historicism, institutionalism, Marxism and Fabianism or by economic history, econometrics and statistics. All that these methods of procedure can establish is history, that is, the description of complex phenomena that happened at a definite place on our globe at a definite date as the consequence of the combined operation of a multitude of factors. From such cognition it is impossible to derive knowledge that could tell us something about the effects to be expected in the future from the application of definite measures and policies, e.g., inflation, price ceilings, or tariffs. But it is precisely this that people want to learn from the study of economics.

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