Samuel Bostaph wrote: >John Medaille and others with similar impressions of Mises' research >methodology may benefit from consulting a standard work in sociology of the >early 20th century--ORIGINS OF SOCIOLOGY by Albion W. Small, Chicago: >University of Chicago Press, 1924. In it, considerable space is dedicated >to explaining the early contributions to sociological theory by the Austrian >Carl Menger. Mises' work is a direct extension of the foundations laid by >Menger. Menger is cited (briefly) in "Human Action" only on the theory of value and on the theory of money. He is not cited in Mises's sociology. You might be able to find a sociologist who will, like Mises, reduce all human relations to either the contractual or the hegemonic. But I suspect that will be very much a minority of a minority within the science. And one can test the theories in one's own life. Since marriage involves a contract, one can call it a contractual relation, but I doubt that such a description exhausts the relationship. One may find it advisable (as I do) to obey one's wife in all matters, but I doubt the term "hegemony" exhausts the relationship. And as it is in one's marriage, so I suspect it is also with the relations with one's children, one's relatives, one's community, one's university, and all of one's social relations; neither contract nor hegemony will exhaust the relation, and the attempt to do so merely results in a naive reductionism. John C. Medaille