ideas are propounded one place, and take root in another, its interesting not perplexing…
at least to me anyhows [;)]
Locke’s Second Treatise also points towards the heart of the anti-mercantilist critique: that the wealth of the world is not fixed, but created by human labor (represented embryonically by Locke’s labor theory of value).
There’s Dudley North?
All I can say is that when Mises writes ‘economists’ in that phrase you quoted, to me he is referring to the Phsyiocrats succession over the Mercantilists.
Even so the Industrial Revolution, as you say, lasted a long stretch. no doubt things could have stagnated if the intellectual support for the great changes wasn’t kept up by the English classical economists that came during the Revolution…
Oh, certainly. I do not think economic ideas had no impact. They’ve had a huge impact. I just think Mises overrates it (as does Rothbard). Elsewhere in HA (I’m having trouble finding it), he says something to the effect that ideology changes history, and not the other way around. I think that is perhaps an overreaction against Marxist materialism, and perhaps a bit of a bias on Mises’ part as an intellectual himself. Of course to an intellectual it’s a nice idea that it is intellectualism that makes the world go 'round. But history is an interplay of both ideology AND brute, accidental facts. It’s not JUST a saga of intellectual heroes lifting up the sword of truth against intellectual villains and saving the day, as Rothbard seems to characterize it.
Okay here’s another question. Mises writes of action as an effort to alleviate a “felt uneasiness”. Given that Mises rightly tries to carefully distinguish praxeology from psychology, isn’t such terminology misleading? Wouldn’t “achieving a goal” or some such phrase be less psychological sounding?
you would need to coin a phrase which had in it the notion of ‘alleviatable deficiency’
plus one needs the motivation to act on it. i.e. not to be indifferent vis the prospect of employing means to fix the deficiency.
one can understand Mises phrase by the easy way in which everyone of us recognises that if we feel uneasy about the way things are to us, that is explanation and motive for our action
Right! I think I know why this terminology is sound. You might not like the idea, though, depending on how much you share Rothbard’s dislike of Hume’s philosophy.
Like you say, there must be some source of motivation for any action, whether that action is performed by a being with the psychology of a human or not. What can we call that motivating factor? A thought? No, because, as Mises wrote, thinking is an act itself. (If an act is motivated by thinking, and thinking itself is an act, then that thinking itself must have an end, and we’re back where we started from.) A “that-which-motivates” which resides WITHIN the agent then must be a feeling, because we can conceive of no other factor within an agent other than thoughts and feelings. (Which makes sense given the etymology of “e-motive” and “e-motion”.) If it is fundamentally feeling (felt uneasiness) that moves thought (which as Mises says, is an action), and not the other way around, then Hume’s dictum, “Reason is slave to the passions”, would seem to be a category of action.
Do feelings come from your heart or your leg or are they produced by the brain. The Brain I think, they are products of the Mind. Does the mind produce things that are not thoughts?
Why are feelings not thoughts?
(p.s. I don’t know the answer)
Well, it depends on your definition of “thought” and “mind”. If you define “thought” as an episode of “thinking”, and define “thinking” in accord with Mises’ characterization of thinking as an action, and “mind” as that factor which generates psychic phenomena, then the answer would be yes, the mind does produce things that are not thoughts. This is because not all psychic phenomena are actions. Emotions and sensations, while they are produced by the mind, are not actions, and therefore, according to Mises’ characterization of “thinking”, are not thoughts.
Is it perhaps a simple issue of semantics? concious thoughts Mises calls actions, and unconscious thought mises does not call action (they are mere data like instinct/reflex etc) and these we conventionally call ‘feeling’
So if, like you said, action, including conscious thought, must be principally motivated by something within the agent, what is that something? Conscious thought? No, because again, that would bring us to a regressus in infinitum. The only thing left is unconscious thought, that which we refer to when we say “feeling” (ie, “felt uneasiness”). If feeling is necessarily the prime mover of conscious thinking, that is just another way of saying, “reason is slave to the passions”.
there is no primacy, they are mutual phenomenon that affect each other. your conscious and unconscious collaborate in the project of you. they are merely different facets of you. there is no human action without them both. there is no human action without the concious thoughts and with only the unconcious. but there is still behaviour with only the unconscious. do you disagree?
Indeed, but, to maintain the Misesian practice of process analysis, taking any given human action, for that particular action, one thing had to come first right?
no, they are synchronous or as good as.
But you yourself said that a notion of “felt uneasiness” (which is a feeling) is necessary in praxeology, because something needs to motivate the action. How can one phenomenon (feeling) motivate another (an action, like, for example, thinking) if the former does not precede the latter in time?
it is possible for two inputs to be necessary to create a certain output, and one needn’t come before the other, they might come together.
i speculate
I have a comment about this book… well, about Austrian theory in general. After reading this book, along with Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market; I don’t understand why it is not part of “Austrian” theory to reason that Economics is not a social science, but it is a natural science. These two works more than any other show the nature of man in his efforts to better his living conditions. It could be extended to rout out all talk of “social science”, because whatever actions man takes, even when combined with others, it is still confined to his nature.
I am not an economics major; and I found myself telling people that economics is a natural science, based on the fact that Austrian theory very much revolves around the indisputable nature of man. When I found that it is a “social science”, I had the suspicion that calling it a social science was just yet another way for statists to build the case that manipulating economic data somehow means economic growth, as any smart statist government would do.
Any thoughts here? perhaps I was wrong to say it is a natural science per se, but I think Austrian theory shows that that is all it can possibly be.
I believe the reason economics is considered a social science is because being a study of human action, it is not predictable or non repeatable. Each person (actor) will act in his (her) own self interest and will not necessarily act the same way at any other time.
On the other hand, a natural science has laws that, if proven correct, results will be repeatable and predictable.
Comments?
Frank Chodorov considered it a natural science…
Indeed the two books did show the nature of man in his effort to better his living conditions. However, economics studies the actions taken by man to fulfill those aims. These actions are non-predictable and they are based not necessarily on his nature but his behaviour. In a way economics studies human behaviour and what determines these behaviours are his actions. The books did show the nature man because both are treatise which expands beyond economics per se. If they were economic textbooks then we could make that case. Hope it helps.