All action aims at results and takes on meaning only in relation to results. The preferring and setting aside that are involved in action take as their standard the importance of the anticipated result for the well-being of the actor. Whatever directly serves well-being is, without difficulty, given a rank in accordance with its importance, and this provides the rank order in which the goals of action stand at any given moment.

The money prices of goods and services that we are able to ascertain are the ratios in which these goods and services were exchanged against money at a given moment of the relatively recent or remote past. These ratios are always past; they always belong to history. They correspond to a market situation that is not the market situation of today.

The universally valid theory of economic action is necessarily formal. Its material content consists of the data of human circumstances, which evoke action in the individual case: the goals at which men aim and the means by which they seek to attain them.6

Classical economics distinguished three factors of production: land, labor, and capital. Inasmuch as capital can be resolved into land and labor, two factors remain: labor and the “conditions of well-being” made available by nature. If consumption goods are disregarded, these alone, according to the view to be found in the older literature, are the objects of economizing.

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 into.

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.