Chapter 2. The Epistemological Problems of the Sciences of Human Action
1. Praxeology and History
There are two main branches of the sciences of human action, praxeology and history.
History is the collection and systematic arrangement of all data of experience concerning human action.
It deals with the concrete content of human action.
It studies all human endeavors in their infinite multiplicity and variety, and all individual
actions with all their accidental, special and particular implications.
It scrutinizes the ideas guiding acting men and the outcome of the actions performed.
It embraces every aspect of human activities.
It is, on the one hand, general history, and, on the other hand, the history of various
narrower fields.
There is the history of political and military action, of ideas and philosophy, of economic
activities, of technology, of literature, art and science, of religion, of mores and
customs and of many other realms of human life.
There is ethnology and anthropology, as far as they are not a part of biology, and there
is psychology, as far as it is neither physiology nor epistemology nor philosophy.
There is linguistics, as far as it is neither logic nor the physiology of speech.
Economic history, descriptive economics and economic statistics are, of course, history.
The term sociology is used in two different meanings.
Descriptive sociology deals with those historical phenomena of human action which are not viewed
in descriptive economics.
It overlaps, to some extent, the field claimed by ethnology and anthropology.
General sociology, on the other hand, approaches historical experience from a more nearly universal
point of view than that of the other branches of history.
Every proper, for instance, deals with an individual town, or with towns in a definite
period, or with an individual people, or with a certain geographical area.
Max Weber, in his main treatise Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, deals with the town in general,
that is, with the whole historical experience concerning towns, without any limitation to
The subject matter of all historical sciences is the past.
They cannot teach us anything which would be valid for all human actions, that is, for
the future too.
The study of history makes a man wise and judicious, but it does not by itself provide
The Natural Sciences, too, deal with past events.
Every experience is an experience of something passed away.
There is no experience of future happenings.
But the experience to which the Natural Sciences owe all their success is the experience of
The experiment in which the individual elements of change can be observed in isolation.
The facts amassed in this way can be used for induction, a peculiar procedure of inference
which has given pragmatic evidence of its expediency, although its satisfactory epistemological
characterization is still an unsolved problem.
The experience with which the sciences of human action have to deal is always an experience
Experiments of Complex Phenomena
No laboratory experiments can be performed with regard to human action.
We are never in a position to observe the change in one element only, all other conditions
of the event being equal to a case in which the element concerned did not change.
Historical experience as an experience of complex phenomena does not provide us with
Facts in the sense in which the natural sciences employ this term to signify isolated events
tested in experiments.
The information conveyed by historical experience cannot be used as building material for the
construction of theories and the prediction of future events.
Every historical experience is open to various interpretations and is in fact interpreted
in different ways.
The postulates of positivism and kindred schools of metaphysics are therefore illusory.
It is impossible to reform the sciences of human action according to the pattern of physics
and the other natural sciences.
There is no means to establish an a posteriori theory of human conduct and social events.
History can neither prove nor disprove any general statement in the manner in which the
and Natural Sciences accept or reject a hypothesis on the ground of laboratory experiments.
Neither experimental verification nor experimental falsification of a general proposition are
possible in this field.
Complex phenomena in the production of which various causal chains are interlaced cannot
test any theory.
Such phenomena, on the contrary, become intelligible only through an interpretation in terms of
theories previously developed from other sources.
In the case of natural phenomena, the interpretation of an event must not be at variance with the
theories satisfactorily verified by experiments.
In the case of historical events, there is no such restriction.
Theories would be free to resort to quite arbitrary explanations.
Where there is something to explain, the human mind has never been at a loss to invent ad
hoc some imaginary theories, lacking any logical justification.
A limitation similar to that which the experimentally tested theories enjoin upon the attempts
to interpret and elucidate individual physical, chemical and physiological events is provided
by Praxeology in the Field of Human History.
Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science.
Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental and individual
circumstances of the concrete acts.
Its cognition is purely formal and general, without reference to the material content
and the particular features of the actual case.
It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond
to those implied in its assumptions and inferences.
Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience.
They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori.
They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts.
They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts.
They are a necessary requirement of any intellectual grasp of historical events.
Without them, we should not be able to see in the course of events anything else than
in Kaleidoscopic Change and Chaotic Muddle, 2. The Formal and Aprioristic Character of Praxeology
A fashionable tendency in contemporary philosophy is to deny the existence of any apriori knowledge.
All human knowledge, it is contended, is derived from experience.
This attitude can easily be understood as an excessive reaction against the extravagances
of theology and asperious philosophy of history and of nature.
Metaphysicians were eager to discover by intuition moral precepts, the meaning of historical
evolution, the properties of soul and matter, and the laws governing physical, chemical
and physiological events.
Their volatile speculations manifested a blithe disregard for matter-of-fact knowledge.
They were convinced that without reference to experience, reason could explain all things
and answer all questions.
The modern natural sciences owe their success to the method of observation and experiment.
There is no doubt that empiricism and pragmatism are right as far as they merely describe the
and the Procedures of the Natural Sciences.
But it is no less certain that they are entirely wrong in their endeavors to reject any kind
of a priori knowledge, and to characterize logic, mathematics and praxeology as empirical
and experimental disciplines.
With regard to praxeology, the errors of the philosophers are due to their complete ignorance
of Economics, and very often to their shockingly insufficient knowledge of history.
In the eyes of the philosopher, the treatment of philosophical issues is a sublime and noble
vocation which must not be put upon the low level of other gainful employments.
The professor resents the fact that he derives an income from philosophizing.
He is offended by the thought that he earns money like the artisan and the farmhand.
Contemporary matters are mean things, and the philosopher investigating the eminent problems
of truth and absolute eternal values should not soil his mind by paying attention to them.
No line of any contemporary philosopher discloses the least familiarity with even the most elementary
problems of economics.
The problem of whether there are or whether there are not a priori elements of thought,
that is, necessary and ineluctable intellectual conditions of thinking, anterior to any actual
instance of conception and experience, must not be confused with the genetic problem of
how man acquired his characteristically human mental ability.
Man is descended from non-human ancestors who lacked this ability.
These ancestors were endowed with some potentiality which in the course of ages of evolution
converted them into reasonable beings.
This transformation was achieved by the influence of a changing cosmic environment operating
upon succeeding generations.
Hence the empiricist concludes that the fundamental principles of reasoning are an outcome of
experience and represent an adaptation of man to the conditions of his environment.
This idea leads, when consistently followed, to the further conclusion that there were
There were, between our pre-human ancestors and homo sapiens, various intermediate stages.
There were beings which, although not yet equipped with the human faculty of reason,
were endowed with some rudimentary elements of ratiocination.
Theirs was not yet a logical mind, but a pre-logical, or rather imperfectly logical mind.
Their desultory and defective logical functions evolved step by step from the pre-logical
state toward the logical state.
Reason, intellect and logic are historical phenomena.
There is a history of logic as there is a history of technology.
Nothing suggests that logic as we know it is the last and final stage of intellectual
evolution.
Human logic is a historical phase between pre-human non-logic on the one hand and superhuman
logic on the other hand.
Reason and mind, the human being's most efficacious equipment in their struggle for survival,
are embedded in the continuous flow of zoological events.
They are neither eternal nor unchangeable.
They are transitory.
Furthermore, there is no doubt that every human being repeats in his personal evolution
not only the physiological metamorphosis from a simple cell into a highly complicated mammal
organism, but no less the spiritual metamorphosis from a purely vegetative and animal existence
into a reasonable mind.
This transformation is not completed in the prenatal life of the embryo, but only later,
When the newborn child step by step awakens to human consciousness, thus every man in
his early youth, starting from the depths of darkness, proceeds through various states
of the mind's logical structure.
Then there is the case of the animals.
We are fully aware of the unbridgeable gulf separating our reason from the reactive processes
of Money, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money
Fundamental Perfect Cognition
But the problem of the a priori is of a different character.
It does not deal with the problem of how consciousness and reason have emerged.
It refers to the essential and necessary character of the logical structure of the human mind.
The fundamental logical relations are not subject to proof or disproof.
Every attempt to prove them must presuppose their validity.
It is impossible to explain them to a being who would not possess them on his own account.
Efforts to define them according to the rules of definition must fail.
They are primary propositions antecedent to any nominal or real definition.
They are ultimate, unanalyzable categories.
The human mind is utterly incapable of imagining logical categories at variance with them.
No matter how they may appear to superhuman beings, they are, for man, inescapable and
absolutely necessary.
They are the indispensable prerequisite of perception, apperception and experience.
They are no less an indispensable prerequisite of memory.
There is a tendency in the natural sciences to describe memory as an instance of a more
general phenomenon.
Every living organism conserves the effects of earlier stimulation, and the present state
of inorganic matter is shaped by the effects of all the influences to which it was exposed
in the past.
The present state of the universe is the product of its past.
We may, therefore, in a loose metaphorical sense, say that the geological structure of
of our globe conserves the memory of all earlier cosmic changes, and that a man's body is
the sedimentation of his ancestors and his own destinies and vicissitudes.
But memory is something entirely different from the fact of the structural unity and
continuity of cosmic evolution.
It is a phenomenon of consciousness, and as such conditioned by the logical a priori.
Scientists have been puzzled by the fact that man does not remember anything from the time
of his existence as an embryo and as a suckling.
Freud tried to explain this absence of recollection as brought about by subconscious suppression
of undesired reminiscences.
The truth is that there is nothing to be remembered of unconscious states.
Animal automatism and unconscious response to physiological stimulations are neither
Neither for embryos and sucklings, nor for adults, material for remembrance.
Only conscious states can be remembered.
The human mind is not a tabula rasa on which the external events write their own history.
It is equipped with a set of tools for grasping reality.
Man acquired these tools, that is, the logical structure of his mind in the course of his
Man is not only an animal totally subject to the stimuli unavoidably determining the circumstances
of his life, he is also an acting being, and the category of action is logically antecedent
to any concrete act.
The fact that man does not have the creative power to imagine categories at variance with
the fundamental logical relations and with the principles of causality and teleology
enjoins upon us what may be called methodological a priorism.
Everybody in his daily behavior again and again bears witness to the immutability and
universality of the categories of thought and action.
He who addresses his fellow men, who wants to inform and convince them, who asks questions
and answers other people's questions, can proceed in this way only because he can appeal
to something common to all men, namely the logical structure of human reason.
The idea that A could at the same time be non-A, or that to prefer A to B could at the
It does not matter for man whether or not, beyond the sphere accessible to the human mind, there are other spheres in which there is something categorically different.
are different from human thinking and acting.
No knowledge from such spheres penetrates to the human mind.
It is idle to ask whether things in themselves are different from what they appear to us,
and whether there are worlds which we cannot divine and ideas which we cannot comprehend.
These are problems beyond the scope of human cognition.
Human knowledge is conditioned by the structure of the human mind.
If it chooses human action as the subject matter of its inquiries, it cannot mean anything
else than the categories of action which are proper to the human mind, and are its projection
into the external world of becoming and change.
All the theorems of praxeology refer only to these categories of action, and are valid
only in the orbit of their operation.
They do not pretend to convey any information about never dreamed of and unimaginable worlds
and relations.
Thus praxeology is human in a double sense.
It is human because it claims for its theorems, within the sphere precisely defined in the
underlying assumptions, universal validity for all human action.
It is human, moreover, because it deals only with human action, and does not aspire to
know about non-human, whether sub-human or super-human, action.
The Alleged Logical Heterogeneity of Primitive Man
It is a general fallacy to believe that the writings of Lucian Lévi-Brûl give support
Note to the doctrine that the logical structure of mind of primitive man was and is categorically
different from that of civilized man.
On the contrary, what Lévi-Brûl, on the basis of a careful scrutiny of the entire ethnological
material available, reports about the mental functions of primitive man, proves clearly
that the fundamental logical relations and the categories of thought and action play
and the intellectual activities of savages, the same role they play in our own life.
The content of primitive man's thoughts differs from the content of our thoughts, but the
formal and logical structure is common to both.
It is true that Levy-Bruhl himself maintains that the mentality of primitive peoples is
essentially mystic and pre-logical in character.
of Man's collective representations are regulated by the law of participation and are consequently
indifferent to the law of contradiction.
However, Levy-Bruell's distinction between pre-logical and logical thinking refers to
the content and not to the form and categorical structure of thinking.
For he declares that also among peoples like ourselves, ideas and relations between ideas
Laws governed by the law of participation exist, more or less independently, more or
less impaired, but yet ineradicable, side by side with those subject to the law of reasoning.
The pre-logical and the mystic are coexistent with the logical.
Levy-Bruell relegates the essential teachings of Christianity to the realm of the pre-logical
mind.
Now many objections can possibly be raised and have been raised against the Christian
doctrines and their interpretation by theology.
But nobody ever ventured to contend that the Christian fathers and philosophers, among
them St. Augustine and St. Thomas, had minds whose logical structure was categorically
different from that of our contemporaries.
The dispute between a man who believes in miracles and another who does not refers to
to the content of thought, not to its logical form.
A man who tries to demonstrate the possibility and reality of miracles may err, but to unmask
his error is, as the brilliant essays of Hume and Mill show, certainly no less logically
intricate than to explode any philosophical or economic fallacy.
Teachers and missionaries report that in Africa and Polynesia, primitive man stops short
at his earliest perception of things, and never reasons, if he can in any way avoid
it. European and American educators sometimes report the same of their students. With regard
to the mossy on the Niger, Levy-Bruell quotes a missionary's observation. Conversation
with them turns only upon women, food, and, in the rainy season, the crops.
What other subjects did many contemporaries and neighbors of Newton, Kant and Levy-Bruhl
prefer?
The conclusion to be drawn from Levy-Bruhl's studies is best expressed in his own words.
The primitive mind, like our own, is anxious to find the reasons for what happens, but
But it does not seek these in the same direction as we do.
A peasant eager to get a rich crop may, according to the content of his ideas, choose various
methods.
He may perform some magical rites, he may embark upon a pilgrimage, he may offer a candle
to the image of his patron saint, or he may employ more and better fertilizer.
And whatever he does, it is always action, that is, the employment of means for the attainment
of ends.
Magic is, in a broader sense, a variety of technology.
Exorcism is a deliberate, purposeful action based on a world view which most of our contemporaries
condemn as superstitious and therefore as inappropriate, but the concept of action does
Does not imply that the action is guided by a correct theory and a technology promising
success, and that it attains the end aimed at.
It only implies that the performer of the action believes that the means applied will
produce the desired effect.
No facts provided by ethnology or history contradict the assertion that the logical
The philosophical structure of mind is uniform with all men of all races, ages and countries.
3.
The Apriori and Reality
Aprioristic reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive.
It cannot produce anything else but tautologies and analytic judgments.
All its implications are logically derived from the premises and were already contained
in them. Hence, according to a popular objection, it cannot add anything to our knowledge.
All geometrical theorems are already implied in the axioms. The concept of a rectangular
triangle already implies the theorem of Pythagoras. This theorem is a tautology. Its deduction
results in an analytic judgment. Nonetheless, nobody would contend that geometry in general
and the theorem of Pythagoras in particular do not enlarge our knowledge.
Cognition from purely deductive reasoning is also creative and opens for our mind access
to previously barred spheres.
The significant task of a prioristic reasoning is, on the one hand, to bring into relief
all that is implied in the categories, concepts and premises, and, on the other hand, to show
is what they do not imply. It is its vocation to render manifest and obvious what was hidden
and unknown before. In the concept of money, all the theorems
of monetary theory are already implied. The quantity theory does not add to our knowledge
anything which is not virtually contained in the concept of money. It transforms, develops
and Unfolds. It only analyzes, and is therefore tautological, like the Theorem of Pythagoras
in relation to the concept of the rectangular triangle. However, nobody would deny the cognitive
value of the quantity theory. To a mind not enlightened by economic reasoning, it remains
unknown. A long line of abortive attempts to solve the problems concerned shows that
And it was certainly not easy to attain the present state of knowledge.
It is not a deficiency of the system of aprioristic science that it does not convey to us the
full cognition of reality.
Its concepts and theorems are mental tools opening the approach to a complete grasp of
reality.
They are, to be sure, not in themselves already the totality of factual knowledge about all
Theory and the comprehension of living and changing reality are not in opposition to one another.
Without theory, the general a prioristic science of human action, there is no comprehension of the reality of human action.
The relation between reason and experience has long been one of the fundamental philosophical problems.
Like all other problems of the critique of knowledge, philosophers have approached it only with reference to the natural sciences.
They have ignored the sciences of human action. Their contributions have been useless for praxeology.
It is customary in the treatment of the epistemological problems of economics to adopt one of the solutions suggested for the natural sciences.
Some authors recommend Poincaré's conventionalism. They regard the premises of economic reasoning as a matter of linguistic or postulational convention.
Others prefer to acquiesce in ideas advanced by Einstein. Einstein raises the question,
How can mathematics, a product of human reason that does not depend on any experience, so exquisitely fit the objects of reality?
Is human reason able to discover, unaided by experience, through pure reasoning, the features of real things?
And his answer is, as far as the theorems of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain,
and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
However, the sciences of human action differ radically from the natural sciences.
All authors eager to construct an epistemological system of the sciences of human action according
to the pattern of the natural sciences err lamentably.
The real thing which is the subject matter of praxeology, human action, stems from the
same source as human reasoning.
Action and reason are congeneric and homogeneous.
They may even be called two different aspects of the same thing.
That reason has the power to make clear through pure ratiocination the essential features
of action, is a consequence of the fact that action is an offshoot of reason.
The theorems attained by correct praxeological reasoning are not only perfectly certain and
incontestable like the correct mathematical theorems.
They refer, moreover, with the full rigidity of their apodictic certainty and incontestability
to the reality of action as it appears in life and history.
Praxeology conveys exact and precise knowledge of real things.
The starting point of praxeology is not a choice of axioms and a decision about methods
of procedure, but reflection about the essence of action.
There is no action in which the praxeological categories do not appear fully and perfectly.
There is no mode of action thinkable in which means and ends or costs and proceeds cannot
be clearly distinguished and precisely separated.
There is nothing which only approximately or incompletely fits the economic category
of an exchange.
There are only exchange and non-exchange, and with regard to any exchange, all the general
theorems concerning exchanges are valid in their full rigidity and with all their implications.
There are no transitions from exchange to non-exchange, or from direct exchange to indirect
exchange.
No experience can ever be had which would contradict these statements.
Such an experience would be impossible in the first place for the reason that all experience
concerning human action is conditioned by the praxeological categories and becomes possible
only through their application.
If we had not in our mind the schemes provided by praxeological reasoning, we should never
be in a position to discern and to grasp any action.
We would perceive motions, but neither buying nor selling, nor prices, wage rates, interest
rates and so on.
It is only through the utilization of the praxeological scheme that we become able to
have an experience concerning an act of buying and selling, but then independently of the
fact of whether or not our senses concomitantly perceive any motions of men and of non-human
and Elements of the External World.
Unaided by praxeological knowledge, we would never learn anything about media of exchange.
If we approach coins without such pre-existing knowledge, we would see in them only round
plates of metal, nothing more.
Experience concerning money requires familiarity with the praxeological category, medium of
exchange.
Science concerning human action differs from that concerning natural phenomena in that
it requires and presupposes praxeological knowledge.
This is why the methods of the natural sciences are inappropriate for the study of praxeology,
economics and history.
In asserting the a priori character of praxeology, we are not drafting a plan for a future new
New Science Different from the traditional sciences of human action.
We do not maintain that the theoretical science of human action should be aprioristic, but
that it is and always has been so.
Every attempt to reflect upon the problems raised by human action is necessarily bound
to aprioristic reasoning.
It does not make any difference in this regard whether the men discussing a problem are theorists
Interests aiming at pure knowledge only, or statesmen, politicians and regular citizens
eager to comprehend occurring changes and to discover what kind of public policy or
private conduct would best suit their own interests.
People may begin arguing about the significance of any concrete experience.
The debate inevitably turns away from the accidental and environmental features of the
the event concerned, to an analysis of fundamental principles, and imperceptibly abandons any
reference to the factual happenings which evoked the argument.
The history of the natural sciences is a record of theories and hypotheses discarded because
they were disproved by experience.
Remember for instance the fallacies of older mechanics disproved by Galileo, or the fate
of the Phlogiston Theory.
No such case is recorded by the history of economics.
The champions of logically incompatible theories claim the same events as the proof that their
point of view has been tested by experience.
The truth is that the experience of a complex phenomenon, and there is no other experience
in the Realm of Human Action, can always be interpreted on the ground of various antithetic
theories. Whether the interpretation is considered satisfactory or unsatisfactory depends on
the appreciation of the theories in question established beforehand on the ground of a prioristic
reasoning. History cannot teach us any general rule,
Principle or Law There is no means to abstract from a historical
experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies.
The data of history would be nothing but a clumsy accumulation of disconnected occurrences,
a heap of confusion, if they could not be clarified, arranged and interpreted by systematic
Praxeological Knowledge, 4.
The Principle of Methodological Individualism.
Praxeology deals with the actions of individual men.
It is only in the further course of its inquiries that cognition of human cooperation is attained,
and social action is treated as a special case of the more universal category of human
action as such.
This methodological individualism has been vehemently attacked by various metaphysical
schools and disparaged as a nominalistic fallacy.
The notion of an individual, say the critics, is an empty abstraction.
Real man is necessarily always a member of a social whole.
It is even impossible to imagine the existence of a man separated from the rest of mankind
and not connected with society.
Man as man is the product of a social evolution. His most eminent feature, reason, could only
emerge within the framework of social mutuality. There is no thinking, which does not depend
on the concepts and notions of language. But speech is manifestly a social phenomenon.
Man is always the member of a collective. As the whole is both logically and temporally
Now the controversy whether the whole or its parts are logically prior is vain.
Logically the notions of a whole and its parts are correlative, as logical concepts they
They are both apart from time.
No less inappropriate with regard to our problem is the reference to the antagonism of realism
and nominalism, both these terms being understood in the meaning which medieval scholasticism
attached to them.
It is uncontested that in the sphere of human action, social entities have real existence.
Nobody ventures to deny that nations, states, municipalities, parties, religious communities
are real factors determining the course of human events. Methodological individualism,
far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of
its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing, their
are changing structures and their operation, and it chooses the only method fitted to solve
this problem satisfactorily.
First, we must realize that all actions are performed by individuals.
A collective operates always through the intermediary of one or several individuals, whose actions
are related to the collective as the secondary source.
It is the meaning which the acting individuals and all those who are touched by their action
attribute to an action that determines its character.
It is the meaning that marks one action as the action of an individual and another action
as the action of the state or of the municipality.
The hangman, not the state, executes a criminal.
It is the meaning of those concerned that discerns in the hangman's action an action of the state.
A group of armed men occupies a place.
It is the meaning of those concerned which imputes this occupation not to the officers
and soldiers on the spot, but to their nation.
If we scrutinize the meaning of the various actions performed by individuals, we must
must necessarily learn everything about the actions of collective wholes, for a social
collective has no existence and reality outside of the individual member's actions.
The life of a collective is lived in the actions of the individuals constituting its body.
There is no social collective conceivable which is not operative in the actions of some individuals.
The reality of a social integer consists in its directing and releasing definite actions
on the part of individuals.
Thus, the way to a cognition of collective wholes is through an analysis of the individual's
actions.
As a thinking and acting being, man emerges from his pre-human existence already as a
social being.
The evolution of reason, language and cooperation is the outcome of the same process.
They were inseparably and necessarily linked together.
But this process took place in individuals.
It consisted in changes in the behavior of individuals.
There is no other substance in which it occurred than the individuals.
There is no substratum of society other than the actions of individuals.
That there are nations, states and churches, that there is social cooperation under the
division of labor, becomes discernible only in the actions of certain individuals.
Nobody ever perceived a nation without perceiving its members.
In this sense, one may say that a social collective comes into being through the actions of individuals.
That does not mean that the individual is temporally antecedent.
It merely means that definite actions of individuals constitute the collective.
There is no need to argue whether a collective is the sum resulting from the addition of
its elements or more, whether it is a being sui generis, and whether it is reasonable or
for not to speak of its will, plans, aims and actions, and to attribute to it a distinct
soul.
Such pedantic talk is idle.
A collective whole is a particular aspect of the actions of various individuals, and
as such a real thing, determining the course of events.
It is illusory to believe that it is possible to visualize collective wholes.
They are never visible.
Our cognition is always the outcome of the understanding of the meaning which acting
men attribute to their acts.
We can see a crowd, that is, a multitude of people.
Whether this crowd is a mere gathering or a mass, in the sense in which this term is
used in contemporary psychology, or an organized body or any other kind of social entity, is
The question which can only be answered by understanding the meaning which they themselves
attach to their presence, and this meaning is always the meaning of individuals.
Not our senses, but understanding, a mental process, makes us recognize social entities.
Those who want to start the study of human action from the collective units encounter
These are an insurmountable obstacle in the fact that an individual at the same time can belong, and with the exception of the most primitive tribesmen, really belongs to various collective entities.
The problems raised by the multiplicity of coexisting social units and their mutual antagonisms can be solved only by methodological individualism.
I and We
The ego is the unity of the acting being.
It is unquestionably given and cannot be dissolved or conjured away by any reasoning or quibbling.
The we is always the result of a summing up which puts together two or more egos.
If somebody says I, no further questioning is necessary in order to establish the meaning.
The same is valid with regard to the thou and, provided the person in view, is precisely
indicated with regard to the he.
But if a man says we, further information is needed to denote who the egos are who are
comprised in this we.
It is always single individuals who say we.
And if they say it in chorus, it yet remains an utterance of single individuals.
The we cannot act otherwise than each of them acting on his own behalf.
They can either all act together in accord, or one of them may act for them all.
In the latter case, the cooperation of the others consists in their bringing about the
situation which makes one man's action effective for them too.
Only in this sense does the officer of a social entity act for the whole.
The individual members of the collective body either cause or allow a single man's action
to concern them too.
The endeavors of psychology to dissolve the ego and to unmask it as an illusion are idle.
The praxeological ego is beyond any doubts.
No matter what a man was, and what he may become later, in the very act of choosing
and acting, he is an ego.
From the pluralis logicus, and from the merely ceremonial pluralis magistaticus, we must
distinguish the pluralis gloriosus.
If a Canadian who never tried skating says, we are the world's foremost ice hockey players,
Or, if an Italian boor proudly contends, we are the world's most eminent painters, nobody
is fooled.
But with reference to political and economic problems, the pluralis gloriosus evolves into
the pluralis imperialis, and as such plays a significant role in paving the way for the
acceptance of doctrines determining international economic policies.
5. The Principle of Methodological Singularism
No less than from the action of an individual, praxeology begins its investigations from
the individual action. It does not deal in vague terms with human action in general,
but with concrete action which a definite man has performed at a definite date and at
at a Definite Place.
But of course, it does not concern itself with the accidental and environmental features
of this action and with what distinguishes it from all other actions, but only with what
is necessary and universal in its performance.
The philosophy of universalism has from time immemorial blocked access to a satisfactory
Universalism, collectivism and conceptual realism see only holes and universals.
They speculate about mankind, nations, states, classes, about virtue and vice, right and
wrong, about entire classes of wants and of commodities.
They ask, for instance, why is the value of gold higher than that of iron?
Thus they never find solutions, but antimonies and paradoxes only.
The best known instance is the value paradox, which frustrated even the work of the classical
economists.
Praxeology asks, what happens in acting?
What does it mean to say that an individual then and there, today and here, at any time
and at any place, acts?
What results if he chooses one thing and rejects another?
The act of choosing is always a decision among various opportunities open to the choosing
individual.
Man never chooses between virtue and vice, but only between two modes of action which
which we call from an adopted point of view virtuous or vicious.
A man never chooses between gold and iron in general, but always only between a definite
quantity of gold and a definite quantity of iron.
Every single action is strictly limited in its immediate consequences.
If we want to reach correct conclusions, we must first of all look at these limitations.
Human life is an unceasing sequence of single actions.
But the single action is by no means isolated.
It is a link in a chain of actions, which together form an action on a higher level,
aiming at a more distant end.
Every action has two aspects.
It is, on the one hand, a partial action in the framework of a further stretching action,
the performance of a fraction of the aims set by a more far-reaching action.
It is, on the other hand, itself a whole, with regard to the actions aimed at by the
performance of its own parts.
It depends upon the scope of the project on which acting man is intent at the instant,
whether the more far-reaching action, or a partial action directed to a more immediate
end only, is thrown into relief.
There is no need for praxeology to raise questions of the type of those raised by Gestalt psychology.
The road to the performance of great things must always lead through the performance of
partial tasks.
A cathedral is something other than a heap of stones joined together, but the only procedure
for constructing a cathedral is to lay one stone upon another.
For the architect, the whole project is the main thing.
For the mason, it is the single wall, and for the bricklayer, the single stones.
What counts for praxeology is the fact that the only method to achieve greater tasks is
to build from the foundations, step by step, part by part.
6.
The Individual and Changing Features of Human Action
The content of human action, that is, the ends aimed at and the means chosen and applied
for the attainment of these ends, is determined by the personal qualities of every acting
man.
Individual man is the product of a long line of zoological evolution which has shaped his
physiological inheritance.
He is born the offspring and the heir of his ancestors, and the precipitate and sediment
of all that his forefathers experienced are his biological patrimony.
When he is born, he does not enter the world in general, as such, but a definite environment.
The innate and inherited biological qualities and all that life has worked upon him make
a man what he is at any instant of his pilgrimage.
They are his fate and destiny.
His will is not free in the metaphysical sense of this term, it is determined by his background
and all the influences to which he himself and his ancestors were exposed.
Inheritance and environment direct a man's actions.
They suggest to him both the ends and the means.
He lives not simply as man in abstracto.
He lives as a son of his family, his race, his people, and his age.
As a citizen of his country.
As a member of a definite social group.
As a practitioner of a certain vocation.
As a follower of definite religious, metaphysical, philosophical and political ideas.
As a partisan in many feuds and controversies.
He does not himself create his ideas and standards of value.
He borrows them from other people.
His ideology is what his environment enjoins upon him.
Only very few men have the gift of thinking new and original ideas, and of changing the
traditional body of creeds and doctrines.
Common man does not speculate about the great problems.
With regard to them, he relies upon other people's authority. He behaves as every decent
fellow must behave. He is like a sheep in the herd. It is precisely this intellectual
inertia that characterizes a man as a common man. Yet the common man does choose. He chooses
to adopt traditional patterns, or patterns adopted by other people, because he is convinced
Most of a man's daily behavior is simple routine.
He performs certain acts without paying special attention to them.
He does many things because he was trained in his childhood to do them, because other
Other people behave in the same way and because it is customary in his environment.
He acquires habits.
He develops automatic reactions.
But he indulges in these habits only because he welcomes their effects.
As soon as he discovers that the pursuit of the habitual way may hinder the attainment
of ends considered as more desirable, he changes his attitude.
A man brought up in an area in which the water is clean acquires the habit of heedlessly
drinking, washing and bathing.
When he moves to a place in which the water is polluted by morbid germs, he will devote
the most careful attention to procedures about which he never bothered before.
He will watch himself permanently in order not to hurt himself by indulging unthinkingly
in his traditional routine and his automatic reactions.
The fact that an action is in the regular course of affairs, performed spontaneously,
as it were, does not mean that it is not due to a conscious volition and to a deliberate
choice.
Indulgence in a routine, which possibly could be changed, is action.
History is not concerned with the changing content of acting, but with its pure form
and its categorical structure.
The study of the accidental and environmental features of human action is the task of history.
7.
The Scope and the Specific Method of History
The study of all the data of experience concerning human action is the scope of history.
The historian collects and critically sifts all available documents.
On the ground of this evidence, he approaches his genuine task.
It has been asserted that the task of history is to show how events actually happened, without
imposing presuppositions and values, vert frei, that is, neutral with regard to all value
judgments.
The historian's report should be a faithful image of the past, an intellectual photograph,
as it were, giving a complete and unbiased description of all facts.
It should reproduce before our intellectual eye the past, with all its features.
Now a real reproduction of the past would require a duplication not humanly possible.
History is not an intellectual reproduction, but a condensed representation of the past
in conceptual terms.
The historian does not simply let the events speak for themselves.
He arranges them from the aspect of the ideas underlying the formation of the general notions
he uses in their presentation.
He does not report facts as they happened, but only relevant facts.
He does not approach the documents without presuppositions, but equipped with the whole
apparatus of his age's scientific knowledge, that is, with all the teachings of contemporary
logic, mathematics, praxeology and natural science.
It is obvious that the historian must not be biased by any prejudices and party tenets.
Those writers who consider historical events as an arsenal of weapons for the conduct of
of their party feuds are not historians but propagandists and apologists.
They are not eager to acquire knowledge but to justify the program of their parties.
They are fighting for the dogmas of a metaphysical, religious, national, political or social doctrine.
They usurp the name of history for their writings as a blind in order to deceive the credulous.
A historian must first of all aim at cognition. He must free himself from any partiality.
He must in this sense be neutral with regard to any value judgments.
This postulate of Wertfreiheit can easily be satisfied in the field of the aprioristic
science, logic, mathematics and praxeology, and in the field of the experimental natural
It is logically not difficult to draw a sharp line between a scientific, unbiased treatment
of these disciplines and a treatment distorted by superstition, preconceived ideas and passion.
It is much more difficult to comply with the requirement of valuational neutrality in history.
For the subject matter of history, the concrete accidental and environmental content of human
Human Action is value judgments and their projection into the reality of change.
At every step of his activities, the historian is concerned with value judgments.
The value judgments of the men whose actions he reports are the substratum of his investigations.
It has been asserted that the historian himself cannot avoid judgments of value.
No historian, not even the naive chronicler or newspaper reporter, registers all facts
as they happen.
He must discriminate.
He must select some events which he deems worthy of being registered, and pass over
in silence other events.
This choice, it is said, implies in itself a value judgment.
It is necessarily conditioned by the historian's world view, and thus not impartial, but an
History can never be anything else than distortion of facts.
It can never be really scientific, that is, neutral with regard to values and intent only
upon discovering truth.
There is, of course, no doubt that the discretion which the selection of facts places in the
hands of the historian can be abused.
It can and does happen that the historian's choice is guided by party bias.
However, the problems involved are much more intricate than this popular doctrine would
have us believe.
Their solution must be sought on the ground of a much more thorough scrutiny of the methods
of history.
In dealing with a historical problem, the historian makes use of all the knowledge provided
by Logic, Mathematics, the Natural Sciences, and especially by Praxeology.
However, the mental tools of these non-historical disciplines do not suffice for his task.
They are indispensable auxiliaries for him, but in themselves they do not make it possible
to answer those questions he has to deal with.
The course of history is determined by the actions of individuals and by the effects
of these actions.
The actions are determined by the value judgments of the acting individuals, that is, the ends
which they were eager to attain, and by the means which they applied for the attainment
of these ends.
The choice of the means is an outcome of the whole body of technological knowledge of the
acting individuals.
It is, in many instances, possible to appreciate the effects of the means applied from the
and the point of view of praxeology or of the natural sciences, but there remain a great
many things for the elucidation of which no such help is available.
The specific task of history for which it uses a specific method is the study of these
value judgments and of the effects of the actions as far as they cannot be analyzed
by the teachings of all other branches of knowledge.
The historian's genuine problem is always to interpret things as they happened.
But he cannot solve this problem on the ground of the theorems provided by all other sciences
alone.
There always remains at the bottom of each of his problems something which resists analysis
at the hand of these teachings of other sciences.
It is these individual and unique characteristics of each event which are studied by the understanding.
The uniqueness or individuality which remains at the bottom of every historical fact when all the means for its interpretation provided by logic, mathematics, praxeology and the natural sciences have been exhausted is an ultimate datum.
But whereas the natural sciences cannot say anything about their ultimate data than that they are such, history can try to make its ultimate data intelligible.
Although it is impossible to reduce them to their causes, they would not be ultimate data if such a reduction were possible, the historian can understand them because he is himself a human being.
In the philosophy of Bergson, this understanding is called an intuition, the sympathy with which one penetrates an object to apprehend its unique and therefore inexpressible identity.
German epistemology calls this act das Spezifische Verstehen der Geisteswissenschaften, or simply Verstehen.
It is the method which all historians and all other people will always apply in commenting upon human events of the past and in forecasting future events.
The discovery and the delimitation of understanding was one of the most important contributions of modern epistemology.
It is, to be sure, neither a project for a new science which does not yet exist, and
is to be founded, nor the recommendation of a new method of procedure for any of the already
existing sciences.
The understanding must not be confused with approval, be it only conditional and circumstantial.
The historian, the ethnologist and the psychologist sometimes register actions which are, for
and their feelings simply repulsive and disgusting. They understand them only as actions, that
is, in establishing the underlying aims and the technological and praxeological methods
applied for their execution. To understand an individual case does not mean to justify
or to excuse it. Neither must understanding be confused with the act of aesthetic enjoyment
of a Phenomenon, Empathy, Einfühlung and Understanding are two radically different attitudes.
It is a different thing, on the one hand, to understand a work of art historically,
to determine its place, its meaning and its importance in the flux of events, and, on
the other hand, to appreciate it emotionally as a work of art.
One can look at a cathedral with the eyes of a historian, but one can look at the same
The same individuals are capable of both modes of reaction, of the aesthetic appreciation,
and of the scientific grasp of understanding.
The understanding establishes the fact that an individual or a group of individuals have
engaged in a definite action emanating from definite value judgments and choices and aiming
at Definite Ends and that they have applied for the attainment of these ends definite
means suggested by definite technological, therapeutical and praxeological doctrines.
It furthermore tries to appreciate the effects and the intensity of the effects brought about
by an action. It tries to assign to every action its relevance, that is, its bearing
upon the course of events.
The scope of understanding is the metal grasp of phenomena which cannot be totally elucidated
by logic, mathematics, praxeology and the natural sciences to the extent that they cannot
be cleared up by all these sciences.
It must never contradict the teachings of these other branches of knowledge.
The real corporeal existence of the devil is attested by innumerable historical documents
which are rather reliable in all other regards. Many tribunals in due process of law have
on the basis of the testimony of witnesses and the confessions of defendants established
the fact that the devil had carnal intercourse with witches. However, no appeal to understanding
could justify a historian's attempt to maintain that the devil really existed and interfered
with Human Events, otherwise than in the visions of an excited human brain.
While this is generally admitted with regard to the natural sciences, there are some historians
who adopt another attitude with regard to economic theory.
They try to oppose to the theorems of economics and appeal to documents allegedly proving
things incompatible with these theorems.
They do not realize that complex phenomena can neither prove nor disprove any theorem,
and therefore cannot bear witness against any statement of a theory.
Economic history is possible only because there is an economic theory capable of throwing
light upon economic actions.
If there were no economic theory, reports concerning economic facts would be nothing
Having more than a collection of unconnected data open to any arbitrary interpretation.