----- Original Message ----  
Steven Horwitz wrote:   
  
His defense of methodological individualism is not an ontological one, but an
epistemological one.  All of the statements about humans as social beings can be
reconciled with his methodological individualism by noting, as he does, that
"Methodological individualism, far from contesting the significance of  such collective
wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming
and their disappearing, their changing structures, and their operation." (HA:  42).
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Is individual purpose a sufficient cause of all social action? Mises appears to think it
is. Institutionalist in the tradition of Veblen note that while purposeful individuals may
act and cause events, we learn nothing about what causes the purposes to arise in the
first place. This is the primary question that I understand John Medaille to be
addressing. To me, Marx made the point most clearly: "By ... acting on the external world
and changing it, he [man] at the same time changes his own nature."
  
Pat Gunning's "logical structure of the human mind" is impervious to such change. He can,
thereby, insist that the subject matter of economics is "how people act under the
conditions of a market economy." The approach makes our focus the means involved for
attaining an end, and removes from focus the molding of ends by social circumstances and
psychological interactions.
  
This is where I find a systematic bias. The Misian way of looking at matters
systematically neglects the ways in which the modern economy constitutes the purposeful
individual. Ideology enters here insofar as the discourse of purposeful action theory is
directed at reconciling us to accepting capitalist institutions as the inevitable
byproduct of social life.
  
Michael Nuwer