This is the last book that Mises wrote. It has been released by the Mises Institute in a new edition and it comes with a very big pitch.
There are two senses in which this book is indeed ultimate: it deals with the very core of economics as a science, and it is the last book that he wrote. For that reason, it is a real milestone in the history of the Misesian oeuvre that this book is newly available in this beautiful new hardbound edition.
Also, the content reflects a lifetime of learning and his desire to make one last impassioned statement to save both economics and liberty from sure destruction at the hands of intellectual error.
As his career was coming to a close, Mises saw that that fiercest battles over economic questions come down to issues of epistemology: how do we determine what is and what is not true in economics? How do we even know that economics is a valid science? What are the methods we should use in studying economics? What constitutes a true proposition and how do we know?
These questions matter because, as Mises says, the very future of freedom and civilization itself depend on economic science, the development and application of which was “the most spectacular event of modern history.”
Between Mises’s earliest writings on this subject and this book, two movements had taken hold: “scientific” planning in public policy, and positivism in the social sciences. Mises here battles both, first by showing how the two are related, and, second, by demolishing the basis of both. He shows that humans cannot be studied in the same way that we study the physical world. We are dealing with volitional beings whose choices make controlled experiments completely impossible.
It is most unfortunate that the hard core followers of Mises are so insistent on some of his ideas which do not add value. He never understood the critical rationalist critique of positivism and it now seems that experimental economics, a thriving field of research, has not yet arrived at Auburn.
Mises’ praxeology with its inferences not subject to falsification on the ground of experience and facts seems to be the antithesis of Popperian falsification.
What is your view?
Indeed, I do not accept the strong form of a priorism that can be read in von Mises, instead I favour the “fallible apriorism” that Barry Smith read into the Austrians, especially Menger.