Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Economics

Quote :

Quote :: From: History of Political Economy, Annual Supplement to vol. 22 (1990), 263-288.

1. Preamble
There are, familiarly, a range of distinct and competing accounts of the methodological underpinnings of Menger's work. These include Leibnizian, Kantian, Millian, and even Popperian readings; but they include also readings of an Aristotelian sort, and I have myself made a number of contributions in clarification and defence of the latter.⁽¹⁾ Not only, I have argued, does the historical situation in which Menger found himself point to the inevitability of the Aristotelian reading;⁽²⁾ this reading fits also very naturally to the text of Menger's works.⁽³⁾

The diversity of interpretations is not, however, entirely surprising. It is on the one hand a consequence of the fact that Menger breaks new ground in economic theory in part by fashioning new linguistic instruments not yet readily capable of unambiguous interpretation. It reflects further a lack of knowledge on the part of historians of economic thought of the most recent scholarship on 19th and 20th century Austrian philosophy and on the role of Aristotelianism therein.⁽⁴⁾ Still more importantly, perhaps, it reflects the fact that Aristotelian ways of thinking were for so long alien to the modern philosophical and scientific mind. For non-Aristotelian readings were advanced above all by those who would be charitable to Menger by stripping his ideas of what was held to be an unfashionable residue of metaphysics.⁽⁵⁾

There is one further reason for the diversity of interpretation, however, which reflects a recurring problem faced by those of us who work in the history of ideas in general and in the history of Austrian ideas in particular. This is the problem of how much credence one ought to award to self-interpretations when seeking an assessment of the nature and significance of a given thinker's achievements. For self-interpretations are very often flawed as a result of the fact that their authors naturally give prominence to the detailed differences between their own ideas and the ideas of those around them; they pay attention, in other words, to what is original, quirky or odd. That which they take for granted, and which they have imbibed from their surrounding culture, is hereby no less naturally, and inevitably ignored. Now as anyone who has worked through the writings of Menger's Austrian philosophical contemporaries very soon becomes aware, the tacit intellectual background of educated Austrians in Menger's day and beyond was Aristotelian through and through to such an extent that Menger himself might have felt the need to draw attention to this background only when attempting to explain his ideas to those, such as Walras, or his own son Karl Jr., who did not share it. Menger is otherwise relatively silent as far as methodological self-interpretation is concerned, at least in the sense that he does not ally himself explicitly for example with the Aristotelian camp.⁽⁶⁾

Problems arise, however, when we consider the writings of those of Menger's Austrian contemporaries and successors including Mises, Hayek, as well as Karl Jr. who have sought self-interpretations of Menger at one remove. Such Austrian Austrians are, I want to suggest, least likely to enjoy a conscious awareness of the essence of Austrian economic thinking. Their interpretations of Menger will tend to pick out what is quirky, or especially modern, in Menger at the expense of the shared and therefore for practical purposes invisible background that holds his work together. And this background is, as cannot be too often stress, Aristotelian even if only in the watered-down sense that is still to be more precisely specified. Indeed the Aristotelian background permeated Austrian thought to such an extent that even the newly burgeoning empiricism of the Austrian positivist movement was crucially coloured by it.⁽⁷⁾

^{http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/articles/menger.html}

Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Economics

Aristotle, Menger, Mises: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Economics

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