Notes

NOTES TO PREFACE

1.   About historicism, see Mises, Theory and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 198 ff.

2.   A striking example of this ignorance displayed by an eminent philosopher is quoted in Mises, Human Action (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 33 note.

NOTES TO PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING PRAXEOLOGY

1.   R. W. Emerson, Brahma.

2.   Bentham, “Essay on Nomenclature and Classification,” Appendix No. IV to Chrestomathia (Works, ed. Bowring [1838-1843], VIII, 84 and 88).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1.   Cf. Louis Rougier, Traité de la connaissance (Paris, 1955), pp. 13 ff.

2.   Ibid., pp. 47 ff.

3.   Cf. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (University of California Press, 1951), p. 137.

4.   Cf. Morris Cohen, A Preface to Logic (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1944), pp. 44 and 92; Mises, Human Action, pp. 72-91.

5.   Mises, Human Action, pp. 86 ff.

6.   As J. Benda, La crise du rationalisme (Paris, 1949), pp. 27 ff., suggests.

7.   About the “protocol language,” cf. Carnap, “Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft,” Erkenntnis, II (1931), 432-465, and Carnap, “Uber Protokollsätze,” Erkenntnis, III (1932/33), 215-228.

8.   Cf. Reichenbach, op. cit., pp. 157 ff.

9.   B. Russell, Religion and Science (London: Home University Library, 1936), pp. 152 ff.

10. About the “understanding,” see below pp. 48 ff.

11. Cf. Reichenbach, op. cit., p. 162.

12. Ibid., p. 161.

13. Karl Vogt, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (2nd ed.; Giessen, 1855), p. 32.

14. Cf. Mises, Theory and History, pp. 108 ff.

15. Cf. Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, ed. Kautsky (Stuttgart, 1897), pp. x-xii.

16. Marx, op. cit., p. xi.

17. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, I.

18. Marx, Das Kapital (7th ed.; Hamburg, 1914), Vol. I, ch. xxiv, p. 728. For a critical analysis of this argumentation, see Mises, Theory and History, pp. 102 ff.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1.   See below, p. 53.

2.   Says R. G. Collingwood (The Idea of History [Oxford, 1946], p. 249): “There is a slang usage, like that for which ‘hall’ means a music hall or ‘pictures’ moving pictures, according to which ‘science’ means natural science.” But “in the tradition of European speech ... continuing unbroken down to the present day, the word ‘science’ means any organized body of knowledge.” About the French usage, see Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (5th ed.: Paris, 1947), pp. 933-940.

3.   Otto Neurath, Foundations of the Social Sciences (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. II, No. 1 [3rd impression; University of Chicago Press, 1952]), p. 9.

4.   Ibid., p. 17.

5.   Mises, Human Action, pp. 237 ff.

6.   T. Kotarbiński, “Considérations sur la théorie générale de la lutte,” Appendix to Z Zagadnien Ogólnej Teorii Walki (Warsaw, 1938), pp. 65-92; the same author, “Idée de la methodologie générale praxeologie,” Travaux du IXe Congrès International de Philosophie (Paris, 1937), IV, 190-194. The theory of games has no reference whatever to the theory of action. Of course, playing a game is action, but so is smoking a cigarette or munching a sandwich. See below, pp. 87 ff.

7.   See below, p. 67.

8.   Mises, Theory and History, pp. 264 ff.

9.   When H. Taine in 1863 wrote, “L’histoire au fond est un problème de psychologie” (Histoire de la litérature anglaise [10th ed.; Paris, 1899], Vol. I, Introduction, p. xlv), he did not realize that the kind of psychology he had in mind was not the natural science called experimental psychology, but that kind of psychology we call thymology and that thymology is in itself a historical discipline, a Geisteswissenschaft in the terminology of W. Dilthey (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften [Leipzig, 1883]). R. G. Collingwood (The Idea of History [Oxford, 1946], p. 221) distinguishes between “historical thought” that “studies mind as acting in certain determinate ways in certain determinate situations” and a problematic other way of studying mind, viz., by “investigating its general characteristics in abstraction from any particular situation or particular action.” The latter would be “not history, but mental science, psychology, or the philosophy of mind.” Such “a positive mental science as rising above the sphere of history, and establishing the permanent and unchanging laws of human nature,” he points out (p. 224), is “possible only to a person who mistakes the transient conditions of a certain historical age for the permanent conditions of human life.”

10. Language, Thought and Culture, ed. by Paul Henle (University of Michigan Press, 1958), p. 48. Of course, the analogy is not complete, as the immense majority stop in their cultural evolution long before they reach the thymological heights of their age.

11. Mises, Theory and History, pp. 140 ff.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

1.   L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York, 1922), pp. 188 ff.

2.   See below, p. 65.

3.   About the most eminent instance of this doctrine, that of H. Th. Buckle, see Mises, Theory and History, pp. 84 ff.

4.   About these problems, see Mises, Theory and History, pp. 76-93.

5.   About philosophy of history, see Mises, Theory and History, pp. 159 ff.

6.   Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. I, ch. xxiv, point 7.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1.   J. Schumpeter, Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie (Leipzig, 1908), pp. 606 ff.; W. Mitchell, “Quantitative Analysis in Economic Theory,” American Economic Review, XV, 1 ff.; G. Cassel, On Quantitative Thinking in Economics (Oxford, 1935); and a daily increasing flood of books and articles.

2.   Mises, Human Action, pp. 347 ff.

3.   Now also available in an English-language edition, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York, 1959).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

1.   John Neville Keynes, The Scope and Method of Political Economy (London, 1891), p. 165.

2.   See especially Mises, Human Action, pp. 41-44 and 145-153, and Theory and History, pp. 250 ff.

3.   A. Eddington, The Philosophy of Physical Science (New York and Cambridge, 1939), pp. 28 ff.

4.   Mises, Human Action, pp. 660 ff.

5.   J. v. Neumann and O. Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton University Press, 1944); R. Duncan Luce and H. Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York, 1957); and many other books and articles.

6.   Mises, Human Action, pp. 661 ff.

7.   Games arranged for the entertainment of spectators are not games proper, but show business.

8.   Freud, Totem und Tabu (Vienna, 1913), pp. 79 ff.

9.   The first condition for the establishment of perpetual peace is, of course, the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire capitalism. About this problem, see Mises, Human Action, pp. 680 ff., and Mises, Omnipotent Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), pp. 89 ff.

10. Symptomatic of this mentality is the weight ascribed by politicians to the findings of public opinion polls.

11. N. C. Parkinson, The Evolution of Political Thought (Boston, 1958), p. 306.

12. Ibid., p. 309.

13. Ibid., p. 314.

14. Ibid., p. 314.

15. One must not confuse the “behavioral sciences” with behaviorism. About the latter, see Mises, Human Action, p. 26.

16. Of course, some of these scholars deal with problems of medicine and hygiene.

17. See above, p. 66.

18. Karl Schriftgiesser, Oscar of the Waldorf (New York, 1943), 248 pages.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

1.   Tennyson, In Memoriam, LVI, iv.

2.   L. Rougier, La scolastique et le Thomisme (Paris, 1925), pp. 36 ff., 84 ff., 102 ff.

3.   Etymologicallly, the term “party” is derived from the term “part” as contrasted with the term “whole.” A brotherless party does not differ from the whole and is therefore not a party. The slogan “one-party system” was invented by the Russian Communists (and aped by their adepts, the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis) to conceal the abolition of the individual’s freedom and right to dissent.

4.   About this incident, see W. F. Buckley, Up from Liberalism (New York, 1959), pp. 164-168.

5.   E. R. A. Seligman, “What Are the Social Sciences?” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, I, 3.

6.   It was not the revolutions of the seventeenth century that transformed the British system of government. The effects of the first revoluton were annulled by the Restoration, and in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the royal office was merely transferred from the “legitimate” king to other members of his family. The struggle between dynastic absolutism and the parliamentary regime of the landed aristocracy continued during the greater part of the eighteenth century. It came to an end only when the attempts of the third Hanoverian king to revive the personal regime of the Tudors and the Stuarts were frustrated. The substitution of popular rule for that of the aristocracy was—in the nineteenth century—brought about by a succession of franchise reforms.

7.   See Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft (2nd ed.; Jena, 1932), pp. 15 f. (English-language translation Socialism [Yale University Press, 1951], pp. 40 ff.)

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

1.   “La science est déterministe; elle l’est a priori; elle postule le déterminisme, parce que sans lui elle ne pourrait être.” Henri Poincaré, Dernières pensées (Paris, 1913), p. 244.

2.   See above, p. 69.

3.   “L’homme fait de la métaphysique comme il respire, sans le vouloir et surtout sans s’en douter la plupart du temps.” E. Meyerson, De l’explication dans les sciences (Paris, 1927), p. 20.

4.   The term Liberalism as employed in this essay is to be understood in its classical nineteenth-century connotation, not in its present-day American sense, in which it signifies the opposite of everything that it used to signify in the nineteenth century.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

1.   About the problems of economic calculation, see Mises, Human Action, pp. 201-232 and 691-711.

2.   This answers also the often raised question why the ancient Greeks did not construct steam engines although their physics gave them the theoretical knowledge required. They did not conceive the primary importance of saving and capital formation.

3.   “Modern civilization, nearly all civilization, is based on the principle of making things pleasant for those who please the market and unpleasant for those who fail to do so.” Edwin Cannan, An Economist’s Protest (London, 1928), pp. vi ff.

4.   See Mises, Human Action, pp. 808-816.

5.   Ibid., pp. 72-91.

6.   Communist Manifesto, I.

7.   Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (first published in Russian, 1908).

8.   See Mises, Planned Chaos (1947), pp. 80-87. (Reprinted in Socialism [new ed., Yale University Press, 1951], pp. 582-589.)