On Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises by Mary Sennholz

Author:Mary Sennholz [Mary Sennholz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61016-119-0
Publisher: D. Van Nostrano Company, Inc.
Published: 1956-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

1 “We cannot refuse the name science to logic or to the non-quantitative branches of mathematics . . . etc. Nor is there good reason for refusing the adjective scientific to such works as Aristotle’s Politics or Spinoza’s Ethics and applying it to statistical ‘investigations’ or ‘researches’ that do not advance the understanding of anything.” Morris R. Cohen, Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953), p. 89.

2 Of course, there are so many connections between physical nature and social phenomena, that a division of disciplines as “sciences” as far as they relate to “nature” and “non-scientific studies” as far as they relate to “human action” would be rather silly. Just think of physical and cultural anthropology, of physical and human geography, of physiological and social psychology.

3 John Madge, The Tools of Social Science (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1953), p. 290. (Italics supplied.)

4 For an exposition of the former view see Henry Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality: A Philosophy of Modern Physics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950). For an expression of the latter view see P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1927).

5 An analysis of the attitude of German social scientists may well show that their inferiority complexes are relatively smaller than those of their Anglo-American colleagues. For they do not suffer from frustrations resulting from restrictive definitions of science. The German Wissenschaft cannot meaningfully be restricted to exclude any kind of scholarly inquiry, be it in the social sciences, the humanities, philosophy, or jurisprudence. When a lawyer writes an article for a law review he writes a scientific paper (Wissenschaftliche Arbeit); and the historians of literature, the philologists, the philosophers, the mathematicians, the sociologists, they all are scientists (Wissenschaftler) no less and no more than the physicists and biologists. Feeling secure in their title and status as scientists, they do not have to “assert themselves” as scientists and do not have to show off with working techniques unsuited to their work but “acceptable” under some restictive definition of science. This is not to say that German scholars or German social scientists are free from inferiority complexes—yet one source at least is removed.

6 Sociology, for example, may be given a larger scope so that it may comprise some of the other subjects enumerated; or its scope may be narrowed so that other subjects, such as criminology, become independent. International Studies, which merely emphasize the international aspects of political science, economics, geography, and history, have recently been granted autonomy in many university curricula. History, customarily listed among the social sciences, is sometimes regarded instead as a “method” of social science and sometimes as an “application” of social sciences; again, there are those who insist on excluding it entirely from the social sciences, grouping it with “humanistic studies” (or cultural sciences).

7 This expression, introduced though not coined by F. A. Hayek, is almost self-explanatory: It expresses the desire of an investigator of social phenomena to apply in his studies methods found useful in the natural sciences however ill-adapted for his own purposes.

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