Abstract
Strictly universal laws are necessary in the theoretical social sciences including economics, but all attempts of Mises’ contemporaries to justify them are unsustainable, according to Mises and proponents of historicism. Despite this agreement, Mises relation to historicist positions is judicial. Mises critically describes the limitations of the method of historical understanding (Verstehen). In spite of the obstacles presented in Chapter 2, he maintains that relativistic historism, which he ascribes to Weber, Rickert, Windelband, Collingwood, Dilthey, and Schmoller, and which in Mises’ eyes represents a major threat to the discipline of economics and to human civilization, can be avoided by praxeology.
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Until the present, discussions that superficially address methodology of economics actually reveal different conceptions of the boundaries of the scientific discipline. These boundaries may either define a certain class of phenomena, for instance “economic” behavior, as the object of inquiry, or emphasize a specific perspective on a – usually wider – field of phenomena. Stressing that economics is concerned with a specific aspect of phenomena instead of certain kinds of phenomena gives rise to what is often criticized as economic imperialism – the pervasion of various disciplines by economic methodology. At any rate, once criteria for interesting and justified knowledge in economics are agreed upon, specific research programs result from them. Political economy, econometrics, praxeology, rational choice theory, institutional economics, and behavioral game theory all differ; not least with regards to their empiricism and their normativity. Confer Kirzner ([1960] 1976); Hoover (1995); Milford (2015).
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Confer Iggers (1983).
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The only exceptions would be usually rather uninteresting “descriptions” where an object o is said to have a property P, which is defined solely by listing all the finitely many members of its extension, say P:={o,q,r,s}. Such artificial exceptions could be constructed for relations as well.
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Confer Mises ([1957] 2005, 140–41). Given praxeological theorems remain true or false irrespective of the economic system, what might certainly change is how interesting or practically relevant they are. Mises supposedly would not deny, for example, that if we lived in an economic system without business cycles, elaborating the details of praxeological business cycle theory would lose its practical urgency.
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Linsbichler, A. (2017). Final Destination Relativistic Historicism?. In: Was Ludwig von Mises a Conventionalist?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46170-0_3
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