Pat Gunning wrote:  
>John, it seems to me that you are Mises bashing   
>for no obvious reason. Do you think Mises was   
>ignorant of the notion that the hangman would be   
>regarded as a murderer if the expectations about   
>others actions (the "social context") were   
>different? Do you have any evidence of his ignorance of such things?  
  
  
It seems as if you are asking me to prove what a   
person doesn't know, that is, to prove a   
negative. That I cannot do. I can only deal with   
what someone writes or does not write. And it   
would seem to me that as a Misean scholar, it   
would be a simple task for you to show, from his   
writings, what he thought about the matter. And   
although I do not claim to be a Misean scholar, I   
can easily show that Mises did indeed know that   
only a social context gives individual actions   
any meaning. I know this because he says so (HA   
42). That's not the problem. The problem is that   
he can find no adequate terms to give meaning to   
the social; his theory is merely circular. Mises   
roots all human activities in autistic exchanges   
(HA 243), even though he acknowledges that such   
exchanges may never actually have happened and   
the construction is imaginary (ibid.).   
Nevertheless it is a concept that Mises says   
economics cannot do without. Why can't economics   
do without this imaginary construction? Because,   
Mises tells us, "The specific method of economics   
is the method of imaginary constructions.This   
method is the method of praxeology. (HA 236)" I   
certainly have no dispute with the imaginary   
nature of praxeology, only with its methodological validity.  
  
  From this imaginary construction, Mises tries   
to develop some theory of society, but he has   
only two terms with which to handle social   
relations, the contractual and the hegemonic (HA   
195). The problem is that the contractual forms a   
very small part of our lives, and "hegemony" is a   
loaded term. Neither term really describes social   
action. The truth about man is that he cannot be   
divorced from his purely social being, and no   
"imaginary" autism can be posited without doing   
violence to the reality of man's existence. The   
most important elements of a man's life are not   
matters of  either choice or force, but of gift,   
including the gift of being itself. Each man is   
called into being by the ready-made society of   
the family. From these he receives certain gifts,   
not only the material gifts of food and shelter,   
but the gift of language, of nationality, and of   
culture. Neither contract nor force serve to   
adequately describe these relations. We do not   
contract for our being or for the time of our   
birth; we do not choose our mother tongue or our social environment.  
  
The problem is methodological. Mises (and many   
other economists) tries to construct a theory of   
society without reference to the discipline of   
sociology. As such, it is merely an undisciplined   
conversation, and such conversations tend to   
partake more of ideology than of science. There   
is simply nothing in the training of an   
economist, qua economist, that grants him any   
expertise in social theories, and economists who   
indulge their taste for such theories are merely   
speaking beyond their professional competence. If   
social theory is relevant to the discipline (and   
I think it is), then the economist ought to   
consult the proper discipline, ought to read,   
say, Durkheim or Weber. The economist is then   
free to disagree, but will at least have   
knowledge of that with which he disagrees. He may   
still prefer his imaginary constructs, but at   
least it will be an informed dissent.  
  
  
John C. Medaille