I’m starting to work through Ludwig von Mises’ book, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, which is — luckily for me! — available on the Mises Institute’s website, along with about 500 other full-text books. (A breath of fresh air: an Institute that talks the talk of education and awareness about its ideals, and then follows through with action. How many conservative think tanks charge high prices for short journals and other publications? How many offer full text books online for free?)
The description of the book in the Mises store reads thus:
“This volume was Mises’ “ultimate” book in more than one sense. Not only did it deal with the most fundamental, elemental, and primary sources of economic science; it is “ultimate” also in being Mises’ own last book. Appearing when Mises was well past his eightieth birthday, this work brought to conclusion a sustained flow of scholarly output that had spanned exactly half a century (since the appearance in 1912 of his first book, the first German edition of the celebrated Theory of Money and Credit).
“It should not, therefore, be a matter for surprise that this is a book that was clearly written with enormous passion. Although many of the themes dealt with were themes on which Mises had dwelt in earlier works, here we find them drawn together in a manifesto passionately proclaiming the true character of economics. He dauntlessly defended its epistemological foundations from the attacks of its detractors, disdainfully dismissing the pretensions of philosophies of science built solidly on abysmal ignorance of the teachings of economics.
“For decades Mises had patiently and tirelessly developed his system of social thought. He did this during an age in which the tide of philosophical fashion was, to say the least, not running in his favor. Despite the ascendancy of epistemological views that rendered Mises’ science of human action grossly unacceptable to the philosophers of his time, despite fashionable methodological innovations in economics that made Mises’own economics appear to his critics as an obscurantist obstacle to scientific advance, despite ideological currents that led to Mises’ policy conclusions being set down as both benighted and reactionary — despite all this discouragement and disparagement, Mises never faltered. The passion that suffuses the present work provides an insight into what it was that kept Mises writing and teaching during those bitter decades of intellectual isolation.”
Mises’ struggle against contemporary philosophy is a fascinating piece of history, especially in light of the world events through which Mises lived. Socialism was in its prime for most of Mises’ life, and upon earning a PhD in the early 20th century he entered an academic world that was exploring and acclaiming the viability of managed economies, eugenics, fascism, socialism, and many other violent ideas. He could not find a job with a university because of his ideas, both in Europe and in America, with anti-semitism putting the nail in the coffin for the already suspicious capitalist. A great article on the intellectual struggles of Ludwig von Mises can be found here, written by his greatest student: Murray Rothbard.
The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science is a romp through the epistemology of economics (or, as Mises prefered calling it, praxeology). As such, it is a work in philosophy and not of economics itself — it is the justification rather than the explanation, if you will. Here again Mises stood against the popular general thought of his peers; one such paragraph embodies his philosophical attacks on several schools of thought:
“No thinking and no acting would be possible to man if the universe were chaotic, i.e., if there were no regularity whatever in the succession and concatenation of events. In such a world of unlimited contingency nothing could be perceived but ceaseless kaleidoscopic change. There would be no possibility for man to expect anything. All experience would be merely historical, the record of what has happened in the past. No inference from past events to what might happen in the future would be permissible. Therefore man could not act. He could at best be a passive spectator and would not be able to make any arrangements for the future, be it only for the future of the impending instant. The first and basic achievement of thinking is the awareness of constant relations among the external phenomena that affect our senses. A bundle of events that are regularly related in a definite way to other events is called a specific thing and as such distinguished from other specific things…. Whatever philosophers may say about causality, the fact remains that no action could be performed by men not guided by it. Neither can we imagine a mind not aware of the nexus of cause and effect. In this sense we may speak of causality as a category or an a priori of thinking and acting.”
Makes sense to me. . .
