I wanted to acknowledge and make brief comments on posts regarding 
Mises?s contribution to economics. Thanks, all, for the comments.

I had written:
"Mises's goal was to provide a framework for dealing with phenomena that 
had previously not been clearly identified as distinct from other 
phenomena. That phenomena is interaction among distinctly human actors..."


Jaap Weel wrote: "The difference between "science" and "Wissenschaft" 
seems relevant to me here, because it seems that you could make a case 
that Misesian economics is a Wissenschaft but not a science."

Jaap, I think you may have a good point. I do not have a command over 
German; so I cannot properly evaluate your point authoritatively. So I 
take it as accurate. There are instances in some of the translations of 
Mises?s earlier works where I think the translator chose words that 
later caused confusion. Mises himself translated his HUMAN ACTION and he 
chose the word "science." I suspect that this choice caused confusion 
mainly because few readers had sufficient command over the different 
sciences or academic disciplines to evaluate his claim that economics is 
a science in either case. The fundamental question, which I am sure 
Mises had to face, was that of distinguishing between science and 
non-science and (given your translation) between an "academic 
discipline" and a non-academic discipline (or an academic 
non-discipline). I have not thought deeply about that. I try to avoid 
the problem by defining economics as a branch of praxeology, which I 
define as a logical system of deductions based on assumptions 
fundamental assumptions about the nature of action and subsidiary 
assumptions. Here is something I wrote many years ago on how Mises 
defined economics:

http://www.nomadpress.com/gunning/subjecti/workpape/auseceth.htm



John Womack wrote:

"Does Adolph Wagner (1835-1917) count as an economist here? I suppose 
the mature Mises did not think so. But see Veblen's review in the 
Journal of Political Economy, I, 1 (1892). And was it not Wagner who 
made Menger acceptable to the "historical school" (despite Schmoller)?

Anyway, it is certainly true that he distinguished between menschliche 
Handeln (human interaction) and wirthschaftliche Handeln (economic 
interaction). See for example his Grundlegung der politischen Oekonomie 
(1892).

For that matter, the same distinction, already classic for Wagner, see 
the preface to Menger's Grundsaetze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (1871), 
online thanks to the German Mises website: 
http://docs.mises.de/Menger/Menger_Grundsaetze.pdf .

It would be interesting to know how Mises wrote of Handeln and 
Handlungen before English translations of his work began to appear, and 
how he came to translate Wissenschaft as simply "science," or if he 
actually did, and if not, who did."


John, I am not sure that we are writing about the same thing. I agree 
that there were many efforts, prior to Mises, to distinguish economic 
interaction from non-economic interaction. But I am not aware of any by 
economists that attempted to distinguish distinctly human action from 
other phenomena (human non-action, non-human behavior) for the purpose 
of providing a foundation for economics as the study of distinctly human 
action under market economy conditions.

This applies to Gossen, who Mises credited with deriving the method of 
tracing the prices of the factors of production back to consumer utility.

I looked at Veblen?s review. His quotations from Wagner show greater 
sympathy by Wagner for Menger than I would have expected. On the other 
hand, I don?t think that Wagner's statements are sufficiently detailed 
to make a good judgment about his appreciation of how to "clearly" 
distinguish interaction among distinctly human actors from other 
phenomena. To determine the significance of Wagner and Veblen?s desire 
for a psychological foundation for economics in relation to Mises, I 
would have to look more closely at how they used these terms.

Veblen does show that Wagner?s views are different from those of 
Schmoller and other German historicists, which is something that I did 
not know.

Thanks again.
 
Pat Gunning