The most important theoretical knowledge gained from a basic analysis of the effects of price controls is this: the effect of intervention is the very opposite of what it was meant to achieve. If government is to avoid the undesirable consequences it cannot stop with just market interference. Step by step it must continue until it finally seizes control over production from the entrepreneurs and capitalists. It is unimportant, then, how it regulates the distribution of income, whether or not it grants a preferred income position to entrepreneurs and capitalists.

The knowledge that the constellation of the market determines prices precisely, or at least within narrow limits, is relatively new.1 Some earlier writers may have had a dim notion of it, but only the Physiocrats and the classical economists elaborated a system of exchange and market relations.

Sociology cannot grasp human action in its fullness. It must take the actions of individuals as ultimately given. The predictions it makes about them can be only qualitative, not quantitative. Accordingly, it can say nothing about the magnitude of their effects.

If one conceives of “nature” as Kant did, as “the existence of things as far as it is determined according to universal laws,”91  and if one says, in agreement with Rickert, “Empirical reality becomes nature when we view it with respect to the universal; it becomes history when we view it with respect to the particular and the

The battle of the proponents of historicism against the nomothetic science of human action was absurd and preposterous, and the rejection of the demand of naturalism that historical investigations, pursued with the methods of the natural sciences, should seek for “historical laws” was necessary and fully justified.

Anti-Marxism fully subscribes to Marxism’s hostility towards capitalism. And it resents Marxism’s political pro­gram, especially its presumed internationalism and pacifism. But resentment does not lend itself to scientific work, or even to politics. At best it lends itself to demagoguery.

Werner Sombart himself proudly confessed that he gave a good part of his life to fight for Marx.23 It was Sombart, not the wretched pedants of the ilk of Kautsky and Bernstein, who introduced Marx to German science and familiarized German thought with Marxist doctrines. Even the structure of Sombart’s main work, Modern Capitalism, is Marxian.

Max Weber did not want merely to outline a program and methodology for a science of social phenomena. In addition to excellent treatises on history, he himself published extensive works that he termed sociological. We, of course, cannot recognize their claim to this designation. This is not meant as an unfavorable criticism. The investigations collected in Weber’s posthumously published major work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, belong to the best that German scientific literature of the last decades has produced.

We call the method of scientific work that examines the effect, ceteris paribus, of change in one factor, the static method.74  Nearly everything that sociology and its hitherto best developed branch, economics, have thus far accomplished is due to the use of the static method.