----- 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). ----------------- End Orginal Message ----------------- 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