Praxeology according to Mises

Ludwig von Mises saw praxeology — “the general theory of human action” — as the foundation of proper economic reasoning. Starting from the self-evident fact that men “act” so as to substitute more satisfactory states of affairs for those now existing, he believed he could build the basic toolkit of economic science by working deductively from secure first principles and their necessary implications, bringing in empirical data as needed. (See Human Action.)

Mises cited the French social philosopher Alfred V. Espinas (1844–1922) as the first writer to use the term “praxeology” (1890). (Actually, as Guido Hülsmann has noted, Louis Bourdeau used it in 1882.) In his Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962) Mises called history and praxeology “the two branches of the sciences of human action.” So far, a completed praxeology existed only within economics, but Polish philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński was working on a “praxeological theory of conflict and war.”

Mises’s disciple Murray Rothbard enumerated the sciences of human action in his Man, Economy, and State (1962). Many disciplines — psychology, ethics, aesthetics, and history — study men’s ends. Technology deals with men’s use of physical “means to arrive at ends.” As a broader science, praxeology organizes the “formal implications of the fact that men use means to achieve various chosen ends.” Economics was “so far the only fully elaborated subdivision of praxeology.” He added, “Attempts have been made to formulate a logical theory of war and violent action,” without saying who had done it. In a piece on Polish economist Oskar Lange in 1971, Rothbard referred to Kotarbiński and noted his interest in “efficient as well as hostile action.”

In these brief comments Mises and Rothbard introduced an interesting project and one that does seem, at first, a topic worth pursuing from within Austrian economics. But there is little to suggest that Austrian economists have done so. Nor did Mises or Rothbard develop such a theory. Instead, they wrote on war, war finance, et cetera, as political theorists or historians. The same is true of the various analyses of American military-industrial corporatism by Don Lavoie (1951–2001) and Robert Higgs. Neither proposed (as such) a praxeology of hostile action.

Tadeusz Kotarbiński’s praxeology

In an essay on the general methodology of praxeology in 1937, Kotarbiński set his proposed science the task of “determining and systematizing all the riches of the diverse forms of action” to produce a “grammar of action” oriented toward practice (= successful action). In Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (1994), philosopher Barry Smith provides a useful sketch of Kotarbiński’s philosophy in most of its phases. Kotarbiński believed only material objects are fully “real”; some of them (human beings) can make and do (act). That perhaps rendered his account of institutions somewhat ad hoc, but his interests lay in technique and efficiency treated almost as moral imperatives. That his career continued through the communist period suggests that the Polish regime found his work relatively unthreatening.

Hostile action

Kotarbiński sketched out (in Polish) a praxeology of hostile action in On the General Question of the Theory of Conflict (Warsaw, 1938), with a summary in French (“Les Idées Fondamentales de la Theorie Générale de la Lutte,” first published in 1936. We rely here on the French text.) Kotarbiński states that the theory of armed conflict presupposes a theory of conflict-in-general, and therefore rests on the general theory of action. Thus A, who acts in favor of a certain state of affairs, and B, who works toward an opposed state of affairs, have incompatible goals. Each side must make “lucid choices of means to his ends.” The resulting actions are fourfold: positive, negative, aimed at change, or opposed to change.

Victory comes when one side obtains its goal at the decisive moment. Some conflicts may remain unresolved. Material resources differ from material “put to work.” One must maintain his freedom of action — even flight restores it. Executing a move removes the freedom to act differently. A menace can be better than attack and it is possible to menace the enemy on two sides. Any initial richness of alternatives will undergo degradation. One must strike before inertia sets in. Economize and save forces. Derange the enemy’s coordination. Military amateurs sometimes prevail by making unexpected moves. We may leave to one side whether Kotarbiński tells us much more here than Sun Tzu, Napoleon with his maxims, or Clausewitz have done.

Leon Krzemieniecki and Roman Kalina write that Kotarbiński returned to this subject in later publications, including A Treatise on Good Work (1955, 1982). There he treated struggle as a kind of “negative co-operation” and wrote one chapter on the techniques of struggle. In 1984 he made a case-study of “eristics”: the strategy of debate. (See “Agon — a term connecting the theory of struggle with belles-lettres,” Archives of Budo, 2011, online.)

The limits of praxeology

As a theory (or method) of efficient action, Kotarbiński’s general praxeology seems rather widespread in the post–Cold War world: in academic writing on sports, military affairs, management, pastoral care, and other fields. The trend is noticeable in Poland and Scandinavia and looms large in French sociology (where praxeology first began). Inevitably, some writers have drawn connections between (or among) Austrian praxeology, praxiology (the usual European spelling), American pragmatism, and even Marxist praxis (= specifically human action centering on labor). It would be hard to assess the value of this recent work for ongoing reflection on social life.

As noted, there seems as yet to be no specifically Austrian-school praxeology of hostile action. But perhaps such a praxeology would be a vain undertaking. There are certainly many ways in which such a project could run off the rails. Cooptation by states is one: a praxeology that offers “efficiency” advice to war-makers is not a self-evidently good thing. It is not surprising that, currently, Kotarbiński’s praxeology, which interested the Polish army in the late 1930s, turns up in pro–NATO position papers by Polish scholars and is cited by U.S. military theorists at the Air University near Montgomery. In the Cold War, of course, it was game theory — with a superficially similar starting point and greater promise of quick results — that played the role of the (U.S.) state’s chief war-making science. In so doing, game theory largely displaced any praxeological analysis of hostile action.

Let us grant that analysis of individual choices between goods might support marginal utility analysis, which in turn might support an entire micro-economic outlook — provided that broad generalizations from individual choices and two-party exchanges can explain complex interactions over whole societies. But, even so, praxeology has definite limits. Rothbard himself gave up on sociologist Talcott Parsons’s formalistic sociology (despite Parsons’s attempted theorizing of action), once he realized its limits. As we have said, Mises and Rothbard in fact studied conflict historically — Mises in Omnipotent Government (1944), Rothbard in “War, Peace, and the State” (1963), and many other works.

For all his talk about methodological individualism, Rothbard knew that individuals act in ideological, institutional, and other social settings. A universal logic only speaks to basic problems. Rothbard himself admitted as much, when he described economics as the least verstehende (i.e., interpretive) human science of action (and thus the most general and formal), and history as the most verstehende: the most grounded in particulars (“Praxeology as the Method of Economics”).

How to study conflict

A praxeology of hostile action might conceivably shed light on boxing matches, private feuds, or bar room brawls in terms of moves and countermoves. It would shed much less light on wars between nation-states. Conceiving the contestants in war as “two” giant single actors consisting of millions of people is (although often done) more a cheat than a legitimate move, since these “actors” are complex and call for analysis of institutions, hierarchies, ideas, culture, and the lot.

Looking outside of praxeology, we find economist Kenneth Boulding, for example, who dealt with threats and counterthreats in the institutional context of competing states. Over time, he wrote, whole “threat systems” arise as “milorgs” (military organizations) beset with transportation costs, internal flows, inputs and outputs, and no exact “product,” but able to do harm “much faster than good” (“Towards a Pure Theory of Threat Systems”). Other notable writers on large-scale violence are R.E. Canjar, Martin Shaw, Elaine Scarry, Joan Dyste-Lind, and French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Their works — along with those of Rothbard (cf. his remarks on violence in Man, Economy, and State) — suggest that a judicious reworking of the categories of critical sociology would prove broadly useful at a level above that of abstract individuals.

The point is to find the right level of abstraction or generality (as C. Wright Mills said) for dealing with actions as modified by institutional roles, expectations, values, ideologies, and hierarchies, and to develop an array of middle-level sociological constructs serviceable in the study of states and war. We need to draw on the language of “relations of state” (Ralph Raico), “surplus death” (Theresa Wirtz [aka R.E. Canjar]), the “production” and “social relations of violence,” “symbolic” and “statist capital” (Bourdieu), “tribute systems,” “coercive resources” (Dyste-Lind), state “command posts” and “hegemonic bonds” (Rothbard), and for that matter, decumulation of enemy capital (see recent reports on NATO targeting in Serbia), and the means of predation.

A different starting point

Kotarbiński himself admitted that “the more general a given praxeological maxim the more trivial the idea it contains.” He also wrote that “what may be good from the praxeological point of view may be justly condemned on ethical grounds.”

Despite such observations, it might be premature to abandon praxeological approaches to large-scale conflict entirely. Elaine Scarry’s approach seems remarkably praxeological, but with important and necessary changes. Focusing on what people do in war, she states a first premise (which she calls “self-evident”): War is the production of injury. Abandoning pairs of individuals, she adds a second premise: in war, organized human collectivities engage in what is formally “a contest” by out-injuring their adversaries. Under certain agreed fictions, the “victor” is the side that retains the power to injure, when the other side does not. Scarry then puts these fictions under withering fire, undermining the usual justifications for war as well a great many comforting belligerent metaphors (“Injury and the Structure of War”).

Her revised premises thus produce insights that Kotarbiński necessarily missed, and they (while few in number) might indeed undergird further theoretical and historical work.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 edition of Future of Freedom.