There is an old saying that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, falsely attributed to the Duke of Wellington, the Iron Duke who presided over the event. I suppose it means that battles are won by teamwork and this is pre-eminently sponsored by the manly outdoor games that they play in England. How often do the French win team sports? And they don’t even play cricket. [Actually cricket is not a good example of a team game, it was once described as a game that you play against eleven people on the other side and ten people on your side]. But the Viennese don’t play team sports either. Ludwig von Mises may have played some squash but that only proves the point, they don’t even have doubles in squash. Come to think of it, squash is probably an ideal game for academics because they get to hit their opponent (as if by accident) even though it is a officially a non-contact sport.
My point is that Popper and Mises were not team players. They were both founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society but relations between them were very strained. Of course Mises was driven to distraction by the wetness of his colleagues and at least once he stormed from the room in despair “You are all socialists!”.
Popper described his relationship with Mises many years later.
“I was always very conscious of Mises’ absolutely fundamental contribution, and I admired him greatly. I wish to emphasize this point since both he and I were aware of a strong opposition between our views in the field of the theory of knowledge and methodology…I respected Mises, who was much older than I, far too much to begin a confrontation with him. He talked often to me, but he never went beyond allusions of dissent…Like myself, he appreciated that there was some common ground, and he knew that I had accepted his most fundamental theorems, and that I greatly admired him for these. But he made it clear, by hints, that I was a dangerous person – although I never criticized his view even to Hayek: and I would even now not wish to do so.”
This was a dreadful situation, where the two lions of liberalism, the sleeping giants of the 20th century, did not put their heads together to sort out their differences and learn from each other.
In football and basketball terms they did not pass the ball to each other. They did not speak up to support each other on issues where they agreed and they did not go into a huddle to resolve their differences.
Mises could have learned that the natural sciences did not practice positivism or empiricism, and the so the human sciences could use the same methods (in broad terms). Popper could have learned that the social evils that he feared (monopoly and mass unemployment) did not need to be fixed with more government intervention but less.
Many of their followers have perpetuated the same misunderstandings, so the majority of Popperians are social democrats and the followers of Mises mostly ignore Popper or knock his ideas.
Mises on Popper
Mises used the argument from technology to make fun of Popper’s signature idea – conjectural knowledge. He also wrote a lot of scathing criticism of social engineering without making the distinction between holistic central planning by coercive utopians and piecemeal social engineering (another signature idea of Popper’s) which Mises himself practiced daily during the years that he was an advisor to the Austrian government.
Popper has a low profile among the Austrians, although Pete Boettke often uses the slogan “think like a Misean, write like a Popperian”. The two Popperians with the best grip on economics are Larry Boland and Jack Birner but they do not get cited in the Austrian literature. Two of the younger Austrians wrote a long critique of scientism without a Popper cite. The attitude towards Popper among the strong Miseans like Gordon and Hoppe combines misrepresentation with something close to contempt.
Hoppe getting Popper wrong.
Gordon and Mises on Popper.
Hoppe again.
