Friedrich August von Hayek, Epistemological Problems of Economics

Hayek’s review, originally published in 1964 and reprinted in the supplied 2013 version, examines the English translation of Ludwig von Mises’s essays on the foundations of economics and social science. It presents the essays as an early formulation of Mises’s general theory of human action and as a still-relevant challenge to attempts to derive theory directly from historical observation.

Though the work of a living and active author, this publication must be regarded as the belated issue of an English version of a classic.

This judgment establishes the review’s historical perspective. The essays precede Mises’s comprehensive exposition in Human Action, but their importance is not merely preparatory. Hayek values their proximity to the controversies that prompted their arguments: they disclose the immediate intellectual occasions of positions later presented as a systematic whole. Their translation consequently makes available both a foundational statement and a clearer view of its polemical origins.

Hayek situates the essays within Mises’s movement from specialized economic questions toward a general philosophy of human action. Although Mises had not yet adopted “praxeology” as his preferred name for this theory, Hayek finds its chief elements already present. Economics serves as a central instance of the methodological problems facing theoretical social inquiry, rather than exhausting the essays’ significance.

The original controversies chiefly concerned German writers, but Hayek explicitly resists restricting the argument to that setting:

Indeed, the sort of uncritical empiricism against which this book is mainly directed is today probably found more frequently and in a more naive form among American social scientists than anywhere else.

The geographical shift underscores the review’s contemporary purpose. Hayek treats Mises’s criticism as applicable wherever researchers assume that accumulating observations can itself generate an explanatory theory. The target is not empirical inquiry as such, but a failure to distinguish the logical construction of theory from the evidence used to establish its relevance to particular circumstances.

That distinction governs Hayek’s qualified account of Mises’s emphasis on the a priori character of theory:

He would presumably not deny that the applicability of a theory to particular circumstances depends on the presence or absence of facts which can be ascertained only by experience.

The tentative wording matters. Hayek is interpreting the implications of Mises’s position, not simply reporting an explicit methodological agreement. He distinguishes abstract, deductive descriptions of possible patterns from empirical judgments about whether the conditions for those patterns actually obtain. Experience remains indispensable to application even when theoretical propositions are not distilled from historical experience.

This reconstruction allows Hayek to suggest that Mises’s position is closer to the hypothetico-deductive conception of science associated with Karl Popper than their terminology might imply. The reprint’s editorial qualification, however, records Mises’s rejection of extending Popper’s approach to the sciences of human action. The proposed convergence therefore belongs to Hayek’s interpretation and should not be treated as a consensus between the two thinkers.

Hayek also emphasizes the information available through comprehension of human action, distinguishing it from empathic understanding offered as an explanatory foundation. Social inquiry can draw on knowledge presupposed by communication that is unavailable when studying inanimate objects. The review thus combines appreciation with methodological mediation: it defends Mises’s opposition to naive empiricism while clarifying the role of experience and the distinctive intelligibility of action.