Steve, you bring up a large number of issues, and
bring them up very well. I will deal with only one or two issues.
Steven Horwitz wrote:
>Mises's economics is an economics of meaning.
As a side issue, can one have a "value-free"
economics of meaning? Only if one can treat
"values" and "meanings" as disjoint categories,
and I don't think that is possible.
> Because, he argues, only individuals can
>attribute meaning to actions, any analysis of
>action, including collective action, must
>begin *but not end* with the meaning that individuals ascribe to them.
>It is not that
>social orders are "simply" the product of
>individual action, or that individual actions
>temporally or ontologically precede social
>wholes, but that to *understand* social orders,
>we need to start from the subjective meanings
>that individuals ascribe to them. Mises's
>MI is of a more sophisticated sort, I would
>argue, than the caricature that is frequently
>drawn of MI in the literature, especially the
>critical literature. Emerging from the German
>philosophical literature of the early 20th
>century, Mises's economics has to be understood
>in that context.
This is problematic to say the least, and does
not accord with the way humans really are. If
"meaning" is only the "meaning of individuals,"
than language would be impossible, since
communication depends on shared meanings; it
would be miraculous if there was enough overlap
in individually determined meanings to form a
language. Mises has the social structure derived
from the way we think about it, when in truth the
way we think about it is derived from the social
structure. We get our cues about what things mean
from others; this is simply a matter of fact, for
you, for me, for anybody. It is not that we don't
then internalize and modify those meanings, but
the starting place is not in the individual but
in the social milieu in which he finds himself.
The individual always finds himself already
situated in a social setting from which he
derives meaning, and this setting must be the
starting place for meaning. This is the issue
that Hayek was addressing, though incompletely.
Indeed, this is the situation of man generally;
each of as are called into being by a
relationship between our parents, a relationship
in which we have no part and no choice; we do not
choose to have English as our mother tongue,
America as our nation of origin, or Smith as our
family name. Within this original community of
the family, we learn all our meanings and all our
norms; we may (and likely will) reject or modify
those norms, but even the rejection will be in
the context of the received meanings. We are
always appealing to social norms because that is
the only court of appeal. Now, I do not think
that any of this can be controverted; nor do I
think that it can be reconciled with
"methodological individualism." MI is useful only
to the degree that one diminishes (or eliminates)
the individualism and damn near drops the method. But what remains?
MI is only intelligible within a tradition of
utilitarian individualism, but this tradition
itself is disjoint with the whole history of
human meanings. Mises is reacting, I think,
against an excessive empiricism, and that's to
his credit, but he ends up in a pure idealism of
"imaginary constructs." The problem is that there
seem to be no rules for construction or criteria
for comparison of these constructs, hence the
possible constructions are limited only by the
imagination. Hence anything can be rationalized
with this method. As an historical circumstance
it is only used by those who wish to rationalize
a certain form of capitalism, but there is no
reason why it can't be used by imaginative
socialists, communists, monarchists, feudalists,
aristocrats, or whatever. Without criteria of
comparison there is no way to determine that one
construct is better than another, and hence the
method really doesn't give any answer, except
that answer that the imagination has supplied beforehand.
John C. Medaille
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