One does not satisfactorily characterize the problems of human action if one says that the natural sciences have—up to now, at least—failed to provide anything for their elucidation. A correct description of the situation would have to stress the fact that the natural sciences do not even have the mental tools to become aware of the existence of such problems. Ideas and final causes are categories for which there is no room left in the system and in the structure of the natural sciences.

In view of these disastrous effects of a beginning excessive reaction against the excrescences of positivism, there is need to repeat again that the experimental methods of the natural sciences are the only ones adequate for the treatment of the problems involved.

However, this essay does not deal with theology or metaphysics and the rejection of their doctrines by positivism. It deals with positivism’s attack upon the sciences of human action.

Consistently aiming at an improvement of the conditions under which men have to live, the nations of Western and Central Europe and their scions settled in overseas territories have succeeded in developing what is called —and more often smeared as—Western bourgeois civilization. Its foundation is the economic system of capitalism, the political corollary of which is representative government and freedom of thought and interpersonal communication.

Naturalism plans to deal with the problems of human action in the way zoology deals with all other living beings. Behaviorism wants to obliterate what distinguishes human action from the behavior of animals. In these schemes there is no room left for the specific human quality, man’s distinctive feature, viz., the conscious striving after ends chosen. They ignore the human mind. The concept of finality is foreign to them.

It is customary to hypostatize social cooperation by employing the term “society.” Some mysterious superhuman agency, it is said, created society and peremptorily requires man to sacrifice the concerns of his petty egoism for the benefit of society.

Economics or catallactics, the only branch of the theoretical sciences of human action that has up to now been elaborated, views the collectives as creations of the cooperation of individuals. Guided by the idea that definite ends sought can be attained either better or only by cooperation, men associate with one another in cooperation and thus bring forth what is called groups or collectives or simply human society.

In the political sphere the violent overthrow of the precapitalistic methods of government resulted in the complete abandonment of the feudal concepts of public law and the development of a new constitutional doctrine with legal concepts and terms unknown before.

One of the characteristics of the market economy is the specific way in which it deals with the problems offered by the biological, moral, and intellectual inequality of men.

In the precapitalistic ages the superior, i.e., the smarter and more efficient individuals, subdued and enthralled the masses of their less efficient fellows. In the status society there are castes; there are lords and there are servants. All affairs are managed for the sole benefit of the former, while the latter have to drudge for their masters.

The popular ideas concerning the methods the economists employ or ought to employ in the pursuit of their studies are fashioned by the belief that the methods of the natural sciences are also adequate for the study of human action. This fable is supported by the usage that mistakes economic history for economics. A historian, whether he deals with what is called general history or with economic history, has to study and to analyze the available records. He must embark upon research.