Theory and History
David Gordon
Mises University
July 2014
Philosophy of History
• There are two meanings to “philosophy of
history”, corresponding to the two meanings of
“history.”
• “History” refers both to the events that have
happened in the past and the historian’s study of
these events.
• In like fashion, the philosophy of history means
both theories of a general pattern in history and
the study of how historians know the past.
Praxeology and History
• The historian can use praxeology to help explain
historical events.
• Rothbard in America’s Great Depression uses the
Austrian Business Cycle Theory to explain the
onset of the Great Depression in 1929. This
praxeological theory influences which events he
stresses, e.g., the expansion of the money supply
by the Fed in the late 1920s
The Fall of Rome
• Another example of applying praxeology is
Mises’s brief account in Human Action of the
decline of the Roman Empire.
• Mises emphasizes the fall in trade between the
parts of the empire and also the effects of inflation
and price control. He is applying economic theory
to history.
• He relies on the work of the historian Michael
Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the
Roman Empire.
Rothbard versus Friedman
• Historians who rely on different theories will have
different accounts of the same events.
• Milton Friedman doesn’t accept ABCT. In his
account of the Great Depression ( in Friedman and
Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United
States ), he emphasizes a decline in the money
supply in the early stages of the Depression, not
the expansion in the late 1920s.
Fascism
• Another case where economic theory can
influence the interpretation of history
concerns fascism.
• Marxists viewed fascism as the political
form of monopoly capitalism.
• Mises rejected this view. In fascism and
Nazism, the state runs the economy, even
though it is ostensibly private.
The Historian and Science
• Mises says that a historian’s account cannot
contradict the results of modern science.
• As an example, a contemporary historian writing
about witchcraft would not say that the accused
witches had really made a pact with the devil.
• Oddly, one of the leading 20th-century historians
of witchcraft, Montague Summers, did say that.
Limits of Praxeology
• We can’t deduce particular events from the laws
of praxeology. Praxeology just gives us the
general form any action has. It says nothing about
the content of particular actions.
• As an example, Rothbard uses ABCT to help
explain the effects of the expansion of the money
supply, but he can’t deduce that this expansion
took place.
Limits of Explanation
• Mises here in part agreed with the logical
positivists. They said that a priori truths don’t tell
you anything about contingent events, i.e., events
that might not have happened.
• Mises said that you can’t deduce that particular
events took place from these truths, but they can
help you explain what happened
Other Kinds of Law
• If praxeology doesn’t account for the content of
human acts, can there be other sorts of law that
does? These laws wouldn’t be a priori; they would
be inductive generalizations
• Mises didn’t think so. He said there are no
constants in human action. There is nothing like a
historical law of gravitation, that would enable a
historian to calculate what people will do.
• Human free choice is an ultimate given.
Specific Understanding
• If there are no general laws of history, it
does not follow that a historian can’t
explain individual events.
• He can do so through a grasp of the event
that makes no appeal to generalizations. In
other words, we understand the
individuality of the event, rather than what
it has in common with other events.
Specific Understanding
Continued
• Mises calls this grasp of the individual event
“specific understanding”. He also uses the German
word verstehen and sometimes uses the term
thymology for this kind of knowledge.
• How does specific understanding work? We make
judgments about the goals and beliefs of particular
persons, based on our own knowledge and
experience.
• Specific understanding makes judgments of
relevance about particular events.
Example of Specific
Understanding
• Suppose a historian is trying to understand
Lincoln’s policy in 1861. He will use evidence
about Lincoln’s ends, e.g., his desires to resist
secession and to prevent the further spread of
slavery and his beliefs, e.g., that he had the
military power to force the South to give up, to
explain what he did.
• He isn’t appealing to general laws: he is trying to
understand directly the particular actions Lincoln
took.
Mistakes About Specific
Understanding
• Specific understanding does not imply sympathy
or empathy with what you understand, unlike
appreciating art.
• Kripke thinks it does, and suggests that a
biographer of Hitler who followed Collingwood’s
advice might end up sympathetic to Hitler.
• If you are studying the value judgments of others,
you are making descriptive statements, not
evaluative statements. History can be written in a
value-neutral way.
Another Mistake
• Specific understanding does not imply taking the
historical subject’s words at face value, or not
comparing them with “hard” facts. It also does not
imply that the historian can know the truth by
instinct or intuition.
• Mises in “The Treatment of ‘Irrationality’ in the
Social Sciences” criticized the great medievalist
Ernst Kantorowicz for taking the symbolism of the
Holy Roman Empire to be a true description of
who held power.
Mises and Collingwood
• Mises was influenced in his treatment of specific
understanding by the British philosopher and
historian R. G. Collingwood. (1889-1943).
• Collingwood said that the historian should
recollect the thoughts of the people he studied. In
doing so, the historian and the subject have the
identical thoughts. Mises doesn’t go this far.
• Other writers who wrote about a special way the
historian gets knowledge include Windelband,
Dilthey, Rickert, and Croce
The Positivist Response
• Philosophers sympathetic to positivism such as
Ernest Nagel said that verstehen or specific
understanding might be a useful way to generate
hypotheses. But specific understanding could do
no more. It didn’t give us knowledge.
• We can only judge a case of specific
understanding by how convincing we find it.
Positivism and Historical Laws
• The positivists thought that historical
explanation takes place through appeal to
laws of history. The most important defense
of this view is Carl Hempel, “The Function
of General Laws in History” (1942)
• This is usually called the covering-law
model, following W.H. Dray.
Criticism of the Positivist
Position
• Such laws don’t exist. If we are trying to
explain why Caesar crossed the Rubicon,
there aren’t laws that say, “Ambitious
generals faced with an order that they take
to detract from their honor will, under suchand-such conditions, disobey the order.”
Ideal Types
• Historians also use a technique that resembles
specific understanding, the construction of ideal
types.
• The most famous proponent of ideal types was
Max Weber.
• “Ideal” here doesn’t mean perfect, It means “not
found in the real world”. You construct an ideal
type by bringing together certain characteristics,
such as personality traits.
Ideal Types Continued
• For example, you could have the ideal type
of the bourgeois. You would postulate
someone who was motivated exclusively by
certain goals, not a real-world mix of goals.
• Ideal types are assemblies of characteristics.
They don’t have strict definitions.
• Weber took the rational actor to be an ideal
type. Mises disagreed.
Methodological Individualism
and the Philosophy of History
• A basic principle of praxeology is that only
individuals act.
• Many philosophies of history, i.e, doctrines
that say there is a meaning to the whole of
history, violate this principle.
• Hegel’s Geist, Marx’s forces of production,
and Spengler’s cultures are examples, and
Mises rejected all of these philosophies.