Marxian socialism is beckoning: “Class war, not national war!” It is proclaiming: “Never again [imperialistic] war.” But it is adding in thought: “Civil war forever, revolution.”

National socialism is beckoning: “National unity! Peace among classes!” And it is adding in thought: “War on the foreign enemy!”17

In postwar Germany and Austria, a movement has been steadily gaining significance in politics and the social sciences that can best be described as Anti-Marxism.1 Occa­sionally its followers also use this label.

Usually only those writers can be called Marxists who, as members of a Marxian party, are obliged to indicate approval in their writings of the Marxian doctrines as canon­ized by party conventions. Their scholarship can be no more than “scholasticism.” Their writings aim at preserving the “purity” of the true doctrine, and their proofs consist of quotations from authorities—in the final analysis Marx and Engels. Again and again they conclude that “bourgeois” science has completely collapsed, and that truth can be sought only in Marxism.

Economic theory, like every theory and every science, is rationalistic in the sense that it makes use of the methods of reason?ratio. What, indeed, could science be without reason? Nevertheless, one may seek to pit metaphysical poetry, masquerading as philosophy, against discursive reasoning. However, to do this is to reject science as such.

One can completely agree with Max Weber when he declares:

In all variations and colors the ideas of socialism and syn­dicalism have lost their scientific moorings. Their cham­pions have been unable to set forth another system more compatible with their teachings and thereby refute the charge of emptiness by the theoretical economists. There­fore, they had to deny fundamentally the posibility of theoretical knowledge in the field of social science and, especially, in economics. In their denial they were content with a few critical objections to the foundation of theoretical economics.

The opposition that arose in Germany against the Social­ists of the Chair generally started with an awareness that theoretical investigations of economic problems are essen­tial. As economists, Dietzel, Julius Wolf, Ehrenberg, Pohle, Adolf Weber, Passow, and others rose against the Socialists of the Chair. On the other hand, historians raised objections against the manner in which Schmoller, Knapp, and his pu­pils sought to solve historical tasks. Equipped with the tools of their sciences, these critics approached the doctrines of the Socialists of the Chair from the outside.

Faithful to their principle, the Socialists of the Chair did not create a system of economics, which was the endeavor of the Physiocrats and classical economists, and now the modern subjectivist economists. The socialists were not concerned with creating a system of catallactics.

All the economic policies of the last two generations are designed step by step to abolish private property in the means of production— if not in name, then in substance— and to replace the capitalist social order with a socialistic order.