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GREG RANSOM wrote: 
 
> The full context of this formalist revolution in logic, mathematics, 
> and the social sciences must be understood, however, in the context of 
> the German debates in the Neo-Kantian tradition -- a point made in part by 
> Friedman, and also by Nancy Cartwright, et al in their _Otto Neurath_ 
> Cambridge:  Cambridge U. Press, 1996.  This history would include an account 
> of the key roles of Menger, Windelband, the various schools of Neo- 
> Kantianism, in the picture of knowledge debated in Germany during this 
> time, as well, in the later period in economics, of the key role of the 
> influence of Mises on folks like Robbins, Hayek, and Hutchison, both 
> the way that the Mises picture of value changed the topic of economics 
> for folks like Robbins and the role of the value construction, and how 
> folks like Hayek, Hutchison, and Friedman, among others, reacted against 
> Mises attempt to hang on to the dated picture of synthetic apriori 
> knowledge inherited from Kant and the neo-Kantians. 
 
 
        I quite agree with this paragraph of Greg's comments, so long as we regard the  
formalist revolution as a revolution in the profession of economics (i.e., among those  
who profess to be economists and associate with some set of professional norms, however  
vague) and not a revolution in thought about the phenomena that has traditionally been  
regarded as economic. Hopefully, however, at least some HESers will become more  
interested in the arguments themselves rather than in how different professional  
economists were influenced by others. 
        In my view, Mises's painting of the "picture of value" did not differ in a  
critical way from that of a number of predecessors, including Menger, Boehm Bawerk,  
Fetter, and Davenport. The main difference between Mises and his predecessors is that he  
made the theory of value the basis of his definition of praxeology (the theory of  
distinctly human action), of which economics is a branch. He went on to argue that the  
formalism that had proven so useful in the natural sciences, which were concerned with a  
different class of phenomena, was irrelevant in dealing with the phenomena he identified  
as economic. 
        The only logical response to such an argument is to claim that the phenomena of  
praxeology and the phenomena of natural science are NOT categorically different. So far  
as I know, no one has made this response. 
        Has Mises's argument escaped the attention of the writers that Greg cites? And  
if it has, what does it matter for the "history of economics?" 
 
 
Pat Gunning 
http://stsvr.showtower.com.tw/~gunning/welcome 
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