Hayek at His Most Misesian

Steven Horwitz

Pete has often said that the best reading of Mises is a Hayekian one, and the best reading of Hayek is a Misesian one.  I completely agree, and I've spent energy over the years trying to convince people of the truth of the first half of that aphorism, mostly because it seems that self-proclaimed "Misesians" are more hostile to Hayek than Austrians more favorable to Hayek are to Mises.  But today I offer some evidence for the second half of the aphorism.

On Wednesday, my Austrian course covered Hayek's "The Facts of the Social Sciences" essay.  I think this is Hayek at his most Misesian, and it's worth noting that it was written 1942, well after the "Economics and Knowledge" essay that some argue was Hayek's split from Mises.  Consider the following passages from that essay and see if you think they aren't very Misesian.

Yet there seems to me to be no possible doubt that this [interpretation of the intentions of others] is exactly what we are doing, in ordinary life as well as in the social sciences, when we talk about other people's intelligible action, but that it is the only way in which we can ever "understand" what other people do;  and that, therefore, we must rely on this sort of reasoning whenever we discuss what we all know as specifically human or intelligible activities (62).

If that isn't Mises on "thymology," I don't know what is.  Compare this passage by Mises in Human Action (58):

Understanding is not a privilege of the historians.  It is everybody's business.  In observing the conditions of his environment everybody is a historian.  Everybody uses understanding in dealing with the uncertainty of future events to which he must adjust his own actions.

And is the following Mises or Hayek?'

The claim to which I have referred follows directly from this character of the first part of our task as a branch of applied logic.  But it sounds startling enough at first.  It is that we can derive from the knowledge of our own mind in an "a priori" or "deductive" or "analytic" fashion, an (at least in principle) exhaustive classification of all the possible forms of intelligible behavior.

It's Hayek from the same essay (pp. 67-8). Consider this too:

There can be no doubt that we all constantly act on the assumption that we can in this way interpret other people's actions on the analogy of our own mind and that in the great majority of instances this procedure works (64).

Compare to Mises, again from Human Action (p. 24)

But it is beyond doubt that the principle according to which an Ego deals with every human being as if the other were a thinking and acting being like himself has evidenced its usefulness both in mundane life and scientific research.  It cannot be denied that it works.

The footnote on the subsequent similar paragraph in Mises is to Alfred Schutz's The Phenomenology of the Social World and rightly so.

This essay, as much as any that Hayek wrote, shows the high degree of consistency between he and Mises when it came to the task of the social sciences and the appropriate methods for engaging in social scientific research. 

 

Comments

[K Sralla]

A likely reason why both Popper and Polanyi declined is that they apparently did not like each other. I seem to recall that there was even a charge of plagiarism at one point.

[Rafe Champion]

Struan Jacobs, the inaugural Critical Rationalist Scholar, researched the relationship between Polanyi and Popper: they were on good terms in the early 1950s but became estranged, partly due to their conflicting views on objective and subjective knowledge.

The issue of plagiarism arose in relation to Polanyi and Kuhn where Jacobs found strong evidence that Kuhn lifted some leading ideas of his magnus opus from Polanyi. Not that it is worth much anyway, so it is a wonder the Hayek recommended it to Popper.

The list of CR scholars and the criteria may be of interest. Boettke, Horwitz and Koppl have been nominated for consideration by the committee.

http://www.criticalrationalism.net/people-of-interest/

[K Sralla]

The above statement was more or less a third-hand account that came from an essay by Thomas Torrance, where he related that Magda, Michael's wife, told him that Polanyi felt that *Popper* “pinched” some of Michael's distinctive ideas on the nature of scientific discovery, such as those presented in his paper, “The Unaccountable Element in Science”.

This is a different episode form the Kuhn incident.