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