Fred Foldvary wrote: >Why is an axiomatic deductive approach invalid? Because it presumes that you know which axioms to start with, which presumes (in the case of humane sciences) that you know the final terms for what man and society are, which is to claim you know the end of the argument before it starts. Claims to possession of those terms can always be mooted in reason. What is really the problem is the distinction between the speculative and the practical reason, or as we might term them, the demonstrable and the deliberative. As far as I know, this distinction is not controversial. Demonstrations start in axioms that are considered to be self-evident, or from propositions clearly derivable from such axioms. But axioms of action do not possess this self-evident character. The nature of man is not something self-evident, even to the man himself; it is something discovered in time; this does not preclude reasonable judgements; it does preclude possession of a final term that can be reached by demonstration. The "axioms" will always dissolve into beliefs about the nature of man, beliefs which are reducible to nothing else than belief. As a practical matter, nearly all systems start with terms that at the very least partake of the universal, but it would be very hard to show that any such terms exhaust the universal. I am not advocating cultural relativism, which I in fact reject, but a certain humility and reality in recognizing the source of claims about humans and their societies. As far as reaching the universal, John Locke is an exceptionally bad example. His purpose was to justify the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which was a revolution of property owners (and a relatively new kind of property at that) against royal authority (which embodied another kind of property claim.) His "universality" was limited to a certain class of Englishman, and did not extend to Catholics, Africans, or other "lesser breeds without the law," to use Kipling's quaint phrase. Indeed, he defended slavery and was an investor and shareholder in the Royal African Company, whose major trade was in slaves. For Locke, "the chief end [of society] is the preservation of property" and slaves, being incapable of property, could not have any social or political place or dignity. Do these sound like final terms? Like reason? And yet there is an air of reason about them, but not a reason that ends all reasonable debate. What is true in the case of Locke is true generally: those who make claims to possession of the final terms are usually shown to be mere defenders of some class or interest. Locke defended the new gentry, Smith the worker, Ricardo the investor, and Mises the pure capitalist. This is not always done with an ill will, but arises from the fact that any particular view of man is likely to be partial at best, and only a part of an on-going deliberative process. It is not their claims that are necessarily invalid, but only their particular claims to universality. There is much in Locke I find useful, and nearly nothing I find final; the understanding of some terms he advanced, while others he retarded. He is part and parcel of the on-going deliberative process. Those who claim to have reached the final terms can usually be shown to be servants of some set of class interests, interested only in partial terms, namely the terms that justify their partial interests. John C. Medaille