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

SUBJECTIVISM AND IDEAL TYPESof Gottl. Clearly, if the world of human action can adequately bedescribed only in terms of these and similar metaphors, then socialreality is unpredictable and irrational, and as such not fully accessibleto discursive reasoning and can at most be only partially understoodby the human mind.If this is what social reality looks like, that is, enigmatic,incomprehensible, although everything hangs together witheverything else, then how do methodological solipsists describe socialrelations and how do they explain the emergence of society? In theirview, society is made up of independent and isolated individuals(Hayek 1952b:50–1) who not only lack a common social knowledgeor common experiences but who are made even more isolated bytheir existing knowledge because the latter is scattered, imperfect,specific knowledge based on familiarity with particular circumstances(Hayek 1952b:29–30). 3 Isolated individuals organise into societiesas a result of utilitarian considerations, although the emergence oforganised societies can be an unintended by-product of their actions.According to the proponents of methodological solipsism, theexchange relationship is the social relation par excellence, and thecement that holds society together is a general normative consensus(Mises 1940:125, 128, 167, 180–1).The main epistemological difficulty of this methodologicalprogramme lies in the assumption, however, that the ‘dispersion andimperfection of all knowledge is one of the basic facts from whichthe social sciences have to start’ (Hayek 1964:30). If this is the case,and if individuals—as implied by the ontological position describedabove—are bound together only by social relations modelled afterthe exchange relationship, then how do they understand—or, as socialscientists, what kind of epistemological guarantees do we have thatwe will be able to understand—the meaning and sense of the words,gestures and actions of other human beings?On the basis of the premises sketched above, adherents ofmethodological solipsism seem to suggest there is only one possibleanswer to this question. We have to make the further assumption thatthere exists a mental structure common to all men, that is, the structureof thinking is the same for every human being, or, in other words, thestructure of human thinking is constant (Hayek 1964:23–4, 33–4;1952b:77–8, 102; Mises 1933:126). To put it more simply: we canunderstand human action only by accepting the heuristic andscientifically unverifiable principle according to which the uniformityof human nature guarantees that the acting individual has the samekind of mental outfit, intentions and objectives as we do. (The phrase83