The economist is often prone to look to mechanics as a model for his own work. Instead of treating the problems posed by his science with the means appropriate to them, he fetches a metaphor from mechanics, which he puts in place of a solution. In this way the idea arose that the laws of catallactics hold true only ideally, i.e., on the assumption that men act in a vacuum, as it were. But, of course, in life everything happens quite differently.

All attempts at scientific explanation can at best succeed only in explaining the changes in something given. The given itself is inexplicable. It simply is. Why it is remains hidden from us. It is the irrational?that which reasoning cannot exhaust, that which concepts are unable to grasp without leaving something still unexplained.

It is completely erroneous to believe that the theories of catallactics can in any way be called into question by the assertion that they are merely “rational schemata.”5  I have already attempted elsewhere to set forth in detail the misunderstandings in regard to the logical character of modern economics that Max Weber fell

In the last generation the Instinctive logic of the social sciences was confronted with two tasks. On the one hand, it had to show the distinctive peculiarity, the feasibility, and the necessity of history. On the other hand, it had to show not only that there is, but also how there can be, a science of human action that aims at universally valid cognition. There can be no doubt that a great deal has been accomplished for the solution of these two problems.

The fighting between nations and states, and domestically between political parties, pressure groups, and cliques, so greatly occupies our attention that we tend to overlook the fact that all the fighting parties, in spite of their furious battling, pursue identical economic objectives. We must include here even the advocates of a socialization of the means of production who, as partisans of the Second International and then the Third International with its approval of the New Economic Policy (NEP), at least for the present and near future renounced the realization of their program.

Arthur Travers-Borgstroem,* a Finnish writer, published a book entitled Mutualism that deals with ideas of social re­form, and culminates in a plea for the nationalization of credit. A German edition appeared in 1923.

According to Deumer, banks presently serve private interests. They serve public interests only inasmuch as these do not conflict with the former. Banks do not finance those enterprises that are most essential from the national point of view, but only those that promise to yield the highest re­turn.