The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method
Written toward the end of Mises’s life, his last monograph, The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, returned to economics as a science based on human action. Mises believed that, since the publication of Human Action, economists and scientists alike had misinterpreted the idea of economics as a science by deeming it epistemological positivism—that they believed that the “science” basis was still more rooted in philosophy than in actual science. In this volume, Mises argued that economics is a science because human action is a natural order of life and that it is the actions of humans that determine markets and capital decisions. Since Mises believed these links could be proven scientifically, he concluded that economics, with its basis on that human action, is indeed a science in its own right and not an ideology or a metaphysical doctrine.
The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: An Essay on Method, ed Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006).
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Table of Contents
- CONTENTS
- PREFACE
- THE ULTIMATE FOUNDATION OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE An Essay on Method
- Some Preliminary Observations Concerning Praxeology Instead of an Introduction
- 1: The Permanent Substratum of Epistemology
- 2: On Action
- 3: On Economics
- 4: The Starting Point of Praxeological Thinking
- 5: The Reality of the External World
- 6: Causality and Teleology
- 7: The Category of Action
- 8: The Sciences of Human Action
- CHAPTER 1: The Human Mind
- 1: The Logical Structure of the Human Mind
- 2: A Hypothesis about the Origin of the A Priori Categories
- 3: The A Priori
- 4: The A Priori Representation of Reality
- 5: Induction
- 6: The Paradox of Probability Empiricism
- 7: Materialism
- 8: The Absurdity of Any Materialistic Philosophy
- CHAPTER 2: The Activistic Basis of Knowledge
- 1: Man and Action
- 2: Finality
- 3: Valuation
- 4: The Chimera of Unified Science
- 5: The Two Branches of the Sciences of Human Action
- 6: The Logical Character of Praxeology
- 7: The Logical Character of History
- 8: The Thymological Method
- CHAPTER 3: Necessity and Volition
- 1: The Infinite
- 2: The Ultimate Given
- 3: Statistics
- 4: Free Will
- 5: Inevitability
- CHAPTER 4: Certainty and Uncertainty
- 1: The Problem of Quantitative Definiteness
- 2: Certain Knowledge
- 3: The Uncertainty of the Future
- 4: Quantification and Understanding in Acting and in History
- 5: The Precariousness of Forecasting in Human Affairs
- 6: Economic Prediction and the Trend Doctrine
- 7: Decision-Making
- 8: Confirmation and Refutability
- 9: The Examination of Praxeological Theorems
- CHAPTER 5: On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics
- 1: The Research Fable
- 2: The Study of Motives
- 3: Theory and Practice
- 4: The Pitfalls of Hypostatization
- 5: On the Rejection of Methodological Individualism
- 6: The Approach of Macroeconomics
- 7: Reality and Play
- 8: Misinterpretation of the Climate of Opinion
- 9: The Belief in the Omnipotence of Thought
- 10: The Concept of a Perfect System of Government
- 11: The Behavioral Sciences
- CHAPTER 6: Further Implications of the Neglect of Economic Thinking
- 1: The Zoological Approach to Human Problems
- 2: The Approach of the “Social Sciences”
- 3: The Approach of Economics
- 4: A Remark about Legal Terminology
- 5: The Sovereignty of the Consumers
- CHAPTER 7: The Epistemological Roots of Monism
- 1: The Nonexperimental Character of Monism
- 2: The Historical Setting of Positivism
- 3: The Case of the Natural Sciences
- 4: The Case of the Sciences of Human Action
- 5: The Fallacies of Positivism
- CHAPTER 8: Positivism and the Crisis of Western Civilization
- 1: The Misinterpretation of the Universe
- 2: The Misinterpretation of the Human Condition
- 3: The Cult of Science
- 4: The Epistemological Support of Totalitarianism
- 5: The Consequences