CHAPTER X. EXCHANGE WITHIN SOCIETY
1. AUTISTIC EXCHANGE AND INTERPERSONAL EXCHANGE
Action always is essentially the exchange of one state of affairs for another state of affairs.
If the action is performed by an individual without any reference to cooperation with other individuals,
we may call it autistic exchange.
An instance. The isolated hunter who kills an animal for his own consumption. He exchanges leisure and a cartridge for food.
Within society, cooperation substitutes interpersonal or social exchange for autistic exchanges.
Man gives to other men in order to receive from them. Mutuality emerges. Man serves in order to be served.
The exchange relation is the fundamental social relation.
Interpersonal exchange of goods and services weaves the bond which unites men into society.
The societal formula is do-ut-des.
Where there is no intentional mutuality, where an action is performed without any design
of Being Benefited by a Concomitant Action of Other Men, There is No Interpersonal Exchange,
but Autistic Exchange.
It does not matter whether the autistic action is beneficial or detrimental to other people,
or whether it does not concern them at all.
A genius may perform his task for himself, not for the crowd.
However, he is an outstanding benefactor of mankind.
The robber kills the victim for his own advantage. The murdered man is by no means a partner
in this crime. He is merely its object. What is done is done against him.
Hostile aggression was a practice common to man's non-human forebears. Conscious and purposeful
cooperation is the outcome of a long evolutionary process. Ethnology and history have provided
It is the essential characteristic of the categories of human action that they are
Appedictic and Absolute, and do not admit of any gradation.
There is action or non-action.
There is exchange or non-exchange.
Everything which applies to action and exchange as such is given or not given in every individual
instance according to whether there is or there is not action and exchange.
In the same way, the boundaries between autistic exchange and interpersonal exchange are sharply
distinct.
Making one-sided presence without the aim of being rewarded by any conduct on the part
of the receiver, or of third persons, is autistic exchange.
The donor acquires the satisfaction which the better condition of the receiver gives
to him.
The receiver gets the present as a God-sent gift.
But if presents are given in order to influence some people's conduct, they are no longer
one-sided, but a variety of interpersonal exchange between the donor and the man whose
conduct they are designed to influence.
Although the emergence of interpersonal exchange was the result of a long evolution, no gradual
transition is conceivable between autistic and interpersonal exchange.
There were no intermediary modes of exchange between them.
The step which leads from autistic to interpersonal exchange was no less a jump into something
entirely new and essentially different, than was the step from automatic reaction of the
cells and nerves to conscious and purposeful behavior, to action.
2. CONTRACTUAL BONDS AND HEGEMONIC BONDS
There are two different kinds of social cooperation. Cooperation by virtue of contract and coordination,
and cooperation by virtue of command and subordination, or hegemony. Where and as far as cooperation
is based on contract, the logical relation between the cooperating individuals is symmetrical.
They are all parties to interpersonal exchange contracts. John has the same relation to Tom
as Tom has to John. Where and as far as cooperation is based on command and subordination, there
is the man who commands and there are those who obey his orders. The logical relation
The connection between these two classes of men is asymmetrical.
There is a director and there are people under his care.
The director alone chooses and directs.
The others, the wards, are mere pawns in his actions.
The power that calls into life and animates any social body is always ideological might.
The fact that makes an individual a member of any social compound is always his own conduct.
This is no less valid with regard to a hegemonic societal bond.
It is true, people are, as a rule, born into the most important hegemonic bonds, into the
family and into the state, and this was also the case with the hegemonic bonds of older
Slavery and serfdom, which disappeared in the realm of Western civilization.
But no physical violence and compulsion can possibly force a man against his will to remain
in the status of the ward of a hegemonic order.
What violence or the threat of violence brings about is a state of affairs in which subjection
as a rule is considered more desirable than rebellion.
With the choice between the consequences of obedience and of disobedience, the ward prefers
the former, and thus integrates himself into the hegemonic bond.
Every new command places this choice before him again.
In yielding again and again, he himself contributes his share to the continuous existence of the
hegemonic societal body.
Even as a ward in such a system, he is an acting human being, that is, a being not simply
yielding to blind impulses, but using his reason in choosing between alternatives.
What differentiates the hegemonic bond from the contractual bond is the scope in which
the choices of the individuals determine the course of events.
As soon as a man has decided in favor of his subjection to a hegemonic system, he becomes,
within the margin of this system's activities and for the time of his subjection, a pawn
of the director's actions.
Within the hegemonic societal body, and as far as it directs its subordinates' conduct,
only the director acts.
The wards act only in choosing subordination. Having once chosen subordination, they no
longer act for themselves. They are taken care of.
In the frame of a contractual society, the individual members exchange definite quantities
of goods and services of a definite quality. In choosing subjection in a hegemonic body,
A man neither gives nor receives anything that is definite.
He integrates himself into a system in which he has to render indefinite services and will
receive what the director is willing to assign to him.
He is at the mercy of the director.
The director alone is free to choose.
Whether the director is an individual or an organized group of individuals, a directorate,
And whether the director is a selfish maniacal tyrant or a benevolent paternal despot is
of no relevance for the structure of the whole system.
The distinction between these two kinds of social cooperation is common to all theories
of society.
Ferguson described it as the contrast between warlike nations and commercial nations.
Herbert Simon as the contrast between pugnacious nations and peaceful or industrial nations.
Herbert Spencer as the contrast between societies of individual freedom and those of a militant
structure.
Zumbart as the contrast between heroes and peddlers.
The Marxians distinguish between the Gentile organization of a fabulous state of primitive
of Society, and the eternal bliss of socialism on the one hand, and the unspeakable degradation
of capitalism on the other hand.
The Nazi philosophers distinguish the counterfeit system of bourgeois security from the heroic
system of authoritarian furtum.
The valuation of both systems is different with the various sociologists, but they fully
We agree in the establishment of the contrast, and no less in recognizing that no third principle
is thinkable and feasible.
Western civilization, as well as the civilization of the more advanced Eastern peoples, are
achievements of men who have cooperated according to the pattern of contractual coordination.
These civilizations, it is true, have adopted in some respects bonds of hegemonic structure.
The State, as an apparatus of compulsion and coercion, is, by necessity, a hegemonic organization.
So is the family and its household community.
However, the characteristic feature of these civilizations is the contractual structure
proper to the cooperation of the individual families.
There once prevailed almost complete autarky and economic isolation of the individual household
Units.
When inter-familial exchange of goods and services was substituted for each family's
economic self-sufficiency, it was, in all nations commonly considered civilized, a cooperation
based on contract.
Human civilization, as it has been hitherto known to historical experience, is preponderantly
a product of contractual relations.
Any kind of human cooperation and social mutuality is essentially an order of peace and conciliatory
settlement of disputes.
In the domestic relations of any societal unit, be it a contractual or a hegemonic bond,
there must be peace.
Where there are violent conflicts, and as far as there are such conflicts, there is
neither cooperation nor societal bonds.
These political parties, which in their eagerness to substitute the hegemonic system for the
contractual system, point at the rottenness of peace and of bourgeois security, extol
the moral nobility of violence and bloodshed, and praise war and revolution as the eminently
natural methods of inter-human relations, contradict themselves.
For their own utopias are designed as realms of peace.
The Reich of the Nazis and the Commonwealth of the Marxians are planned as societies of
undisturbed peace.
They are to be created by pacification, that is, the violent subjection of all those not
ready to yield without resistance.
In a contractual world, various states can quietly coexist.
In a hegemonic world, there can only be one Reich or Commonwealth and only one dictator.
Socialism must choose between a renunciation of the advantages of division of labor encompassing
the whole earth and all peoples, and the establishment of a world-embracing hegemonic order.
It is this fact that made Russian Bolshevism, German Nazism and Italian Fascism dynamic,
is aggressive. Under contractual conditions, empires are dissolved into a loose league of
autonomous member nations. The hegemonic system is bound to strive after the annexation of
all independent states.
The contractual order of society is an order of right and law. It is a government under
Under the Rule of Law, Rechtsstaat, as differentiated from the Welfare State, Wulfersstaat, or
Paternal State, Right or Law is the complex of rules determining the orbit in which individuals
are free to act.
No such orbit is left to wards of a hegemonic society.
In the hegemonic state, there is neither right nor law, there are only directives and regulations
which the director may change daily and apply with what discrimination he pleases, and which
the wards must obey. The wards have one freedom only, to obey without asking questions.
3. Calculative Action.
All the praxeological categories are eternal and unchangeable as they are uniquely determined
by the Logical Structure of the Human Mind and by the Natural Conditions of Man's Existence.
Both in acting and in theorizing about acting, man can neither free himself from these categories
nor go beyond them.
A kind of acting categorically different from that determined by these categories is neither
possible nor conceivable for man.
One can never comprehend something which would be neither action nor non-action.
There is no history of acting.
There is no evolution which would lead from non-action to action.
There are no transitory stages between action and non-action.
There is only acting and non-acting.
And for every concrete action, all that is rigorously valid, which is categorically established
with regard to action in general.
Every action can make use of ordinal numbers.
For the application of cardinal numbers and for the arithmetical computation based on
them, special conditions are required.
These conditions emerged in the historical evolution of the contractual society.
Thus, the way was opened for computation and calculation in the planning of future action,
and in establishing the effects achieved by past action.
Cardinal numbers and their use in arithmetical operations are also eternal and immutable categories
of the human mind, but their applicability to premeditation and the recording of action
depends on certain conditions which were not given in the early state of human affairs,
which appeared only later, and which could possibly disappear again.
It was cognition of what is going on within a world in which action is computable and
calculable that led men to elaboration of the sciences of praxeology and economics.
Economics is essentially a theory of that scope of action in which calculation is applied
or can be applied if certain conditions are realized.
No other distinction is of greater significance, both for human life and for the study of
of Human Action than that between Calculable Action and Non-Calculable Action.
Modern civilization is above all characterized by the fact that it has elaborated a method
which makes the use of arithmetic possible in a broad field of activities.
This is what people have in mind when attributing to it the not very expedient and often misleading
epithet of rationality.
The mental grasp and analysis of the problems present in a calculating market system were
the starting point of economic thinking, which finally led to general praxeological cognition.
However, it is not the consideration of this historical fact that makes it necessary to
start exposition of a comprehensive system of economics by an analysis of the market
Economy, and to place before this analysis an examination of the problem of economic calculation.
Not historical nor heuristic aspects enjoin such a procedure, but the requirements of
logical and systematic rigor.
The problems concerned are apparent and practical only within the sphere of the calculating
market economy.
It is only a hypothetical and figurative transfer, which makes them utilizable for the scrutiny
of other systems of society's economic organization, which do not allow of any calculation.
Economic calculation is the fundamental issue in the comprehension of all problems, commonly
be called economic.