The most immediate task, quickly becoming urgent, is to finish a paper for a Rothbard edition of an Italian journal. The papers will address the theme of Rothbard’s development of Austrian economics. Papers need to be submitted in June and if accepted they will be translated into Italian.
Sometimes papers come together smoothly but usually they do not. That is why my convergence of Mises, Parsons and Popper paper has hardly progrssed in a long time. But this year…!! Assisted by several months of long leave.
The Abstract
This paper argues that the best way to develop the economics of von Mises is along the lines of Smith’s “fallible apriorism” rather than the strong program of apriorism advocated by Rothbard. This position is supported by Popper’s epistemology which can also be descried as conjectural (fallible) apriorism.
Smith presented his views as a part of the “Aristotelian” framework that he detected in Menger’s work. This framework is practically identical to the “metaphysical research program” that Popper developed in dialogue with the physicists.
One outcome of the Popper/Smith program is a form of methodological monism that supports the main lines of the program of Carl Menger and his followers in political economy and the social sciences (and classical liberalism).
