7. The Concept and Crisis of Social Policy
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.
6. The Economic Doctrines of Social Liberalism
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.
We have been talking about the housing bubble in Canada for some time now. When the US housing bubble burst the Canadian housing bubble continued to inflate, buoyed by high commodity prices and a better regulated banking system. With commodity prices lower and energy prices crashing the Canadian housing bubble is poised to pop with the Canadian people up to their eyeballs in debt. Only recently did the Bank of Canada admit a bubble existed, but stated that it should not be a problem.
5. The Methodenstreit
As early as the 1870s Walter Bagehot irrefutably exploded the arguments with which the followers of the Historical School rejected the dependability of “theoretical” inquiries in the field of economics. He called the two methods—the Historical School considered them the only permissible methods—the “all-case method” and the “single-case method.” The former works with induction only, and makes the erroneous assumption that this is the road that usually leads the natural sciences to their findings.
2. The Logical Character of History
In the meantime, completely apart from everything connected with the logical problems involved in the relation between sociology and history, an important advance had taken place in the logic of the moral sciences.
3. The Ideal Type and Sociological Law
2. Sociology and History
1. The Methodological and the Logical Problem
To begin with, departing from the procedure usually followed, one must distinguish the methodological from the logical problem.
As a rule, methodology is understood to be logic conceived as the theory of the methods of thought. We shall speak of it in the less customary sense as the technique of scientific thought (heuristic) and contrast it, as an art (ars inveniendi), to the science of logic.
Introduction
Rationalism brought about two revolutionary changes in the sciences of human action. Into history, which had hitherto been the only science of human action, it introduced the critical method. It freed that science from its naive attachment to what had been handed down in the chronicles and historical works of the past and taught it not only to draw upon new sources?documents, inscriptions, and the like?but to subject all sources to critical scrutiny. What the science of history thereby gained can never be lost again, nor has its value ever been contested.
IV. Utilitarianism and Rationalism and the Theory of Action
1. Vierkandt’s Instinct Sociology
None of the objections that have been raised for thousands of years against hedonism and utilitarianism has the least bearing upon the theory of action. When the correlative concepts of pleasure and pain, or utility and disutility, are grasped in their formal sense and are deprived of all material content, all the objections that have been repeated ad nauseam for ages have the around cut from under them.
