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

MISES AND LACHMANN ON HUMAN ACTIONthat the various ‘theorems’ of marginal analysis that have beendeductively arrived at are also necessary to comprehend humanaction, then this is a substantially stronger claim. In other words,why exactly are the concepts of ‘buying’, ‘selling’, etc., beingintroduced in connection with ‘praxeological reasoning’?One way of reconstructing the argument is as follows. Mises doesrecognise that, in order to ‘have’ a concept, we must both be able tothink coherently with it and to recognise things in the world towhich it applies. Consequently, Mises could be taken as arguingthat, unless we know how to use the concept of, say, ‘buying’, wewould discern only unintelligible motions. We must be capable ofapplying the type concept ‘buying’ to any individual actions that fallunder this type. Further, presumably if we are to construct aneconomic theory concerned with the activity of buying, then wemust be able to locate this concept, and thus use it in thinking,within a system of other concepts.However, if Mises’s argument is reconstructed in this form, thena number of problems surface. First, it is not clear why suchconcepts can claim an a priori status: they may just be learned, say,through socialisation. Second, the a priori categories Mises isconcerned with must be both necessary and universal. This couldmean either that all concepts are required in order to comprehendall possible human actions, or that all are required in order tocomprehend each individual action. The former is considerablyweaker than the latter, and would seem to run foul of the problemdiscussed in more detail below. It would seem to require that weknow which concepts to apply to which actions, although it is onlythrough these concepts that we can comprehend any actions at all.This leaves the third possible interpretation of Mises’s argument,which appears relevant to statements such as:No report about any man’s conduct can do without referenceto the praxeological a priori. There is no human action thatcan be dealt with without reference to the categoricalconcepts of ends and means, of success and failure, of costs,profit or loss.(Mises 1990:49)This implies that, in order to conceive the meaning of any actionwhatsoever, we must be able to apply concepts such as ‘costs’ andloss’ to it. This suggests that Mises is attempting to establish thatconceiving the meaning of any action requires all the concepts39