At 09:29 AM 6/11/2008, Pat Gunning wrote:

>Mises's goal was to provide a framework for 
>dealing with phenomena thathad previously not 
>been clearly identified as distinct from 
>otherphenomena. That phenomena is interaction among distinctly human actors.

I was so astounded when I came across these 
sentences, that I didn't quite know what to do. 
The first reaction is to make a flip or satirical 
reply, "Right, no one else has ever commented on 
human relations." But that would not only be 
unprofitable, it would be uncharitable. For 
surely, Pat cannot mean what this sentence says. 
Pat, like everyone else, knows what everyone else 
knows. Namely that, aside from treatises on pure 
mathematics and natural philosophy, every single 
word ever written in every single language has 
for its subject the relation of man to man, man 
to woman, man to society, and man to god, and 
commonly all of these together. There are no 
other topics. Every play, poem, prayer, parable, 
psalm,  sutra, story, history, speech, argument, 
article and joke has only these topics and no 
other. Every learned tome and every learned 
treatise in every learned journal--pure 
mathematics and pure physics aside--have these 
for their subjects. I have a little learning, and 
read somewhat more than most, and yet in all my 
education and all my reading, I cannot think of a 
single exception to this rule. And I very much 
suspect that you can't either. But if you know of 
an exception, please bring it to my attention, 
because I would certainly like to see this 
strange and wonderful object. Strange it will be, 
somewhat like (and I can only imagine here) the 
opening lines of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.

Since you cannot mean what you said, you can only 
mean something different (there's an axiom for 
you), and not merely different, but darker. You 
can only mean (correct me if I am wrong) that it 
has not been handled to your satisfaction, and 
more, that you have discovered a way of handling 
it to everybody's satisfaction, or at least to 
everybody who will be admitted to the company of 
"reasonable men." This is a darker claim indeed. 
It is a claim to have what the post-moderns would 
call a "meta-narrative," one capable of sitting 
in judgment on all the other narratives. It is a 
quasi-religious claim to have accessed the 
springs of human action. Some in Chicago would do 
this by reducing man to a cypher, and the 
Austrians by reducing him to axioms. But it 
always turns out that the meta-narratives cannot 
even be applied successfully to the narratives of 
their own lives, much less everybody else's. All 
the rest of the literature whispers to Chicago 
and Austria alike, "I am not a cypher, you cannot 
reduce me to an axiom. Neither prison can hold 
me." Now, it may be (I fully admit the 
possibility) that you are right and the rest of 
literature is wrong. However, this does involve a 
strange conundrum, on that cannot escape the 
attention of even the most ardent Austrian.

Mises claims, on the one hand, originality for 
his Praxeology. But he also claims, on the other hand, that:

The a priori sciences-logic, mathematics, and praxeology?aim at a knowledge
unconditionally valid for all beings endowed with the logical structure of
the human mind. (HA 57)

In other words, this praxeology which nobody ever 
noticed before has the same epistemological 
status as does logic and mathematics. He 
therefore posits an intuitively obvious but 
hitherto unnoticed science. You will pardon me if I remain a skeptic.


John C. M?daille