Subjectivism and Economic Analysis: Essays in memory of Ludwig ...

SUBJECTIVISM AND IDEAL TYPESconclusions. Nevertheless, this idiosyncratic work must berecognised for what it is: a subtle and intellectually stimu-latingillumination of the problem.(Weber 1975:212)3 Although the logic of this reasoning is very similar to Hayek’sepistemic argument against central planning and socialism, themethodological status of the two arguments is very different.4 According to Lachmann:Natural phenomena exist in time and space only, and observabilityis the only criterion of their existence. The fact, on theother hand, that human action exists in the form of plans, i.e.mental design, permits us to study the relationships betweenhuman action and the plans which guide it. The method ofinterpretation in the social sciences ultimately rests on thepossibility of, and the need for, such comparative study. In thissense, then, we may say that we are able to give an ‘intelligibleaccount’ of human action by revealing the plans which guide it,a task beyond the grasp of the natural sciences. The mere factthat this possibility exists is the foundation of the method ofinterpretation and thus offers a vindication of the plea for themethodological autonomy of the social sciences.(Lachmann 1971:30)5 Cf. Weber:In the economic theory of marginal utility and in every ‘subjective’value theory…there is, to begin with, not an external ‘stimulus’but a ‘need’. This is of course the reverse of the situation we havein the case of the fundamental law of psychophysics. Accordingly,if we wish to express ourselves in ‘psychological’ terms, we dealwith a complex of ‘sensations’, ‘feeling-states’, states of ‘tension’,‘discomfort’, ‘expectation’, and the like, which may at any timebe of most intricate character. And these, moreover, combine with‘memory images’, ‘purposes’, and perhaps conflicting ‘motives’of the most various kinds. Also, while the fundamental law ofpsychophysics instructs us about how an external stimulus evokespsychic conditions,…economics, rather, is concerned with thefact that in virtue of such ‘psychic’ conditions a specificallyoriented external behaviour (action) is evoked.(Weber 1908:27–8)6 According to Weber:It is not only that, at least by and large, the most generalhypotheses and assumptions of the ‘natural sciences’ (in theusual sense of this term) are the most irrelevant ones for ourdiscipline. But further, and above all, precisely as regards the99