I just started reading Human Action. It's been long overdue, and I'm liking it way more than I thought I would. The text is far more approachable than I had been lead to believe, and the ideas are actually easy to follow at this point. The study guide from the Mises Institute is quite helpful, as well.
In the first chapter, Mises states that the objectivity in Austrian economics lies in its inherent subjectivism. That is, by not judging the subjective valuations behind human action and instead treating them as given, Austrian economics keeps an objective view of the social world. I think that is an incredibly powerful but also incorrect statement.
It is indeed true that Austrian economics does treat subjective valuations as given. Austrian economics entails radical relativism and subjectivism with respect to what is a correct or true perception about the world. It is simply enough that the person acting presumes that an action will quell some uneasiness and that person will choose to act.
It's this lack of value judgment that endears Austrian economics to my approach to social work. Helping relationships emerge from a positive, supporting relationship with a nonjudgmental stance. This Rogerian humanism shares a great deal of fellow feeling with the Austrian economic worldview. They start without the presumption of knowledge, where the individual is the expert on their world, and do not judge the person for acting certain ways.
Mises, on a related note, also mentions that individuals experiencing mental health issues are similarly engaging in rational action, as having a faulty, incomplete, or idiosycratic valuation about exchanging these means for this end does not erase that a person acted. However, I believe Mises understandably errs when he addresses those diagnosed with intellectual or developmental disabilities. As our knowledge of this population has grown and assistive technologies gained greater effectiveness, it is certainly apparent that individuals with these disabilities also act and should not (time-related, but still relevant) uncharitably classified non-human.
In spite of these many strengths in the Misesean conception of human action, and the science of human action, Austrian economics (praxeology in the original text), Mises' notion of the objectivity of Austrian economics (lying in its subjectivity in analysis) is vulnerable and unsustainable in light of social scientific critique. In doing economic analysis, a praxeologist does not see the world naively, without aid from existing conceptions. Mises himself acknowledges this problem and terms it imperfect induction--an epiestomological issue in both natural and social sciences. But the praxeologist is by no means immune to this problem--a problem he may at some point later acknowledge or expand upon.
Relavitism is correct. Subjectivism is correct. But it is a problem that social science tends to change based on the experiences of the observer (supposedly objective in Mises' argument). That is, the existing categories a person necessarily brings to the social scientific endeavor are indelibly imprinted within the truth he or she settles upon. There is no neutral observer. This is an epistemological problem as old as the Enlightenment and David Hume, and it is striking to me that Mises does not acknowledge that philosophical problem (at least, not yet).
Roderick Long has an excellent video I had to track down on this very sticky problem (I might find it and post it to this later). In it, he cites a Hayek paper on the facts of the social sciences (again, I forget which one) which supports this objection to Mises' worldview. Long states that Mises agreed with Hayek's paper but left open the question of how either theorist would resolve that inconsistency in their social theory.
I had long thought the debate was a different one. I thought that it was Mises' insistence that rationality was an objective truth that was the epistemological break between the two theorists. In reality, both allow for (indeed, call for) a socially constructed reality that impacts human action. And Mises' tautology that all action is rational isn't a proof--it's a definition of what action is and is not. It is the position of the social scientist--the subject of my favorite Hayek work, The Counter-Revolution of Science--that is the departure point between the two.
The unsustainability of Mises' conception of the objective observer is manifest from even the most average of any writer from the feminist, queer, race, or other critical theory on even their worst day. That knowledge creation and truth-seeking are socially constructed endeavors should not be a surprise to the Austrian economist. Those socially constructed forces, after all, impact all of human action.
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