Pat Gunning wrote: >John, it seems to me that you are Mises bashing >for no obvious reason. Do you think Mises was >ignorant of the notion that the hangman would be >regarded as a murderer if the expectations about >others actions (the "social context") were >different? Do you have any evidence of his ignorance of such things? It seems as if you are asking me to prove what a person doesn't know, that is, to prove a negative. That I cannot do. I can only deal with what someone writes or does not write. And it would seem to me that as a Misean scholar, it would be a simple task for you to show, from his writings, what he thought about the matter. And although I do not claim to be a Misean scholar, I can easily show that Mises did indeed know that only a social context gives individual actions any meaning. I know this because he says so (HA 42). That's not the problem. The problem is that he can find no adequate terms to give meaning to the social; his theory is merely circular. Mises roots all human activities in autistic exchanges (HA 243), even though he acknowledges that such exchanges may never actually have happened and the construction is imaginary (ibid.). Nevertheless it is a concept that Mises says economics cannot do without. Why can't economics do without this imaginary construction? Because, Mises tells us, "The specific method of economics is the method of imaginary constructions.This method is the method of praxeology. (HA 236)" I certainly have no dispute with the imaginary nature of praxeology, only with its methodological validity. From this imaginary construction, Mises tries to develop some theory of society, but he has only two terms with which to handle social relations, the contractual and the hegemonic (HA 195). The problem is that the contractual forms a very small part of our lives, and "hegemony" is a loaded term. Neither term really describes social action. The truth about man is that he cannot be divorced from his purely social being, and no "imaginary" autism can be posited without doing violence to the reality of man's existence. The most important elements of a man's life are not matters of either choice or force, but of gift, including the gift of being itself. Each man is called into being by the ready-made society of the family. From these he receives certain gifts, not only the material gifts of food and shelter, but the gift of language, of nationality, and of culture. Neither contract nor force serve to adequately describe these relations. We do not contract for our being or for the time of our birth; we do not choose our mother tongue or our social environment. The problem is methodological. Mises (and many other economists) tries to construct a theory of society without reference to the discipline of sociology. As such, it is merely an undisciplined conversation, and such conversations tend to partake more of ideology than of science. There is simply nothing in the training of an economist, qua economist, that grants him any expertise in social theories, and economists who indulge their taste for such theories are merely speaking beyond their professional competence. If social theory is relevant to the discipline (and I think it is), then the economist ought to consult the proper discipline, ought to read, say, Durkheim or Weber. The economist is then free to disagree, but will at least have knowledge of that with which he disagrees. He may still prefer his imaginary constructs, but at least it will be an informed dissent. John C. Medaille