I wanted to acknowledge and make brief comments on posts regarding Mises?s contribution to economics. Thanks, all, for the comments. I had written: "Mises's goal was to provide a framework for dealing with phenomena that had previously not been clearly identified as distinct from other phenomena. That phenomena is interaction among distinctly human actors..." Jaap Weel wrote: "The difference between "science" and "Wissenschaft" seems relevant to me here, because it seems that you could make a case that Misesian economics is a Wissenschaft but not a science." Jaap, I think you may have a good point. I do not have a command over German; so I cannot properly evaluate your point authoritatively. So I take it as accurate. There are instances in some of the translations of Mises?s earlier works where I think the translator chose words that later caused confusion. Mises himself translated his HUMAN ACTION and he chose the word "science." I suspect that this choice caused confusion mainly because few readers had sufficient command over the different sciences or academic disciplines to evaluate his claim that economics is a science in either case. The fundamental question, which I am sure Mises had to face, was that of distinguishing between science and non-science and (given your translation) between an "academic discipline" and a non-academic discipline (or an academic non-discipline). I have not thought deeply about that. I try to avoid the problem by defining economics as a branch of praxeology, which I define as a logical system of deductions based on assumptions fundamental assumptions about the nature of action and subsidiary assumptions. Here is something I wrote many years ago on how Mises defined economics: http://www.nomadpress.com/gunning/subjecti/workpape/auseceth.htm John Womack wrote: "Does Adolph Wagner (1835-1917) count as an economist here? I suppose the mature Mises did not think so. But see Veblen's review in the Journal of Political Economy, I, 1 (1892). And was it not Wagner who made Menger acceptable to the "historical school" (despite Schmoller)? Anyway, it is certainly true that he distinguished between menschliche Handeln (human interaction) and wirthschaftliche Handeln (economic interaction). See for example his Grundlegung der politischen Oekonomie (1892). For that matter, the same distinction, already classic for Wagner, see the preface to Menger's Grundsaetze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (1871), online thanks to the German Mises website: http://docs.mises.de/Menger/Menger_Grundsaetze.pdf . It would be interesting to know how Mises wrote of Handeln and Handlungen before English translations of his work began to appear, and how he came to translate Wissenschaft as simply "science," or if he actually did, and if not, who did." John, I am not sure that we are writing about the same thing. I agree that there were many efforts, prior to Mises, to distinguish economic interaction from non-economic interaction. But I am not aware of any by economists that attempted to distinguish distinctly human action from other phenomena (human non-action, non-human behavior) for the purpose of providing a foundation for economics as the study of distinctly human action under market economy conditions. This applies to Gossen, who Mises credited with deriving the method of tracing the prices of the factors of production back to consumer utility. I looked at Veblen?s review. His quotations from Wagner show greater sympathy by Wagner for Menger than I would have expected. On the other hand, I don?t think that Wagner's statements are sufficiently detailed to make a good judgment about his appreciation of how to "clearly" distinguish interaction among distinctly human actors from other phenomena. To determine the significance of Wagner and Veblen?s desire for a psychological foundation for economics in relation to Mises, I would have to look more closely at how they used these terms. Veblen does show that Wagner?s views are different from those of Schmoller and other German historicists, which is something that I did not know. Thanks again. Pat Gunning