This concluding intervention in a published discussion of value theory presents Mises’s defense of economic theory through replies to named participants. The supplied version is a digital republication whose date is unverified. Its scope is the closing contribution itself: Mises recalls his opening remarks and the preceding debate without reproducing them. The argument moves from the status of economic knowledge through analytical method to economic policy, socialist calculation, and the practical importance of value and price theory. Its central contention is that abstract theory provides indispensable knowledge of the consequences of action, without thereby determining the ultimate ends people should pursue.
Mises begins by regretting that a discussion he hoped to keep focused has returned to methodological disputes. He insists on distinguishing Verstehen, the interpretive understanding associated with the human sciences, from Begreifen, conceptual comprehension. The classical economists’ achievement, continued by Menger, was to establish the legitimacy of the latter in studying human action. Historicism contested that legitimacy; Mises carefully distinguishes it from historical scholarship, which need not adopt historicist premises.
Menger vertrat demgegenüber das Recht des Begreifens.
English translation: Menger, by contrast, upheld the legitimacy of conceptual comprehension.
This distinction governs his objections to Weiß and Lederer. Mises accepts that interpretive understanding varies with a person’s background, environment, and position in the division of labor. What he disputes is the extension of that dependence to the truth of economic propositions. His challenge to Marxism and the sociology of knowledge concerns their characterization of unwelcome economics as “bourgeois” science. If economic knowledge necessarily depends on class position, he asks, how can members of different classes meaningfully debate an economic problem? The issue is not whether thinkers have social locations, but whether those locations establish different theoretical truths.
He next rejects Lederer’s appeal to statics and dynamics. A stationary economy is a conceptual construction, not an actual condition to which static analysis must be confined. Static analysis studies change by isolating an altered datum while holding the remainder of a system constant.
Die statische Methode ist eine Methode, die es sich zum Ziel setzt, die Veränderung zu studieren; sie untersucht die Folgen der Änderung eines Datums in einem im übrigen unveränderten System.
English translation: The static method is a method that aims to study change; it examines the consequences of changing one datum in a system that otherwise remains unchanged.
The analytical contrast therefore concerns methods, not two kinds of economy. For Mises, isolating a change is indispensable to a thought experiment. A genuinely dynamic law would have to explain how changes necessarily arise from forces within the system without externally altered data; he notes that the possibility of such an economic dynamics remains disputed.
The discussion then turns to the relationship between subjective value theory and liberal economic policy. Against Weiß’s appeal to statements by Austrian economists, Mises grounds his conclusions in logic rather than authoritative interpretation. He makes the strong claim that opponents of liberalism must oppose subjective value theory and economic theory generally, and describes his own liberalism as arising from value and price theory. Yet his response to Mackenroth specifies how policy criticism can remain independent of an imposed ethical standard: intervention is judged against the purposes its proponents themselves intend, not against ends chosen for them by the economist.
Wertfreiheit der Wissenschaft bedeutet eben ganz und gar nicht, daß wir zu den Fragen der Wirtschaftspolitik vom Standpunkte unserer Wissenschaft nichts zu sagen hätten.
English translation: The value freedom of science does not at all mean that, from the standpoint of our science, we have nothing to say about questions of economic policy.
His example is protectionism. Economics, he maintains, establishes that tariffs and prohibitions diminish aggregate social output. Someone may knowingly accept that loss for other advantages, but this is a political choice beyond economics. The economist’s responsibility is to prevent protection or autarky from being adopted under the mistaken belief that it increases, or at least preserves, output. His commitment to liberalism thus accompanies a distinction between diagnosing consequences and choosing ultimate purposes.
Die letzten Ziele liegen immer jenseits des Bereiches des Rationalen. Die Wahl der Mittel aber, die uns an jene Ziele heranbringen sollen, ist durchaus Sache der Rationalität.
English translation: Ultimate ends always lie beyond the realm of the rational. The choice of the means that are to bring us closer to those ends, however, is entirely a matter of rationality.
Mises illustrates this division through lighting: the desired amount of evening illumination may resist rational adjudication, whereas production techniques and municipal or private provision require rational examination. Reason is consequently an instrument for reaching chosen ends, not a tyrannical power imposing them.
The remaining replies reinforce the demand that objections engage theoretical arguments. Mackenroth, Mises complains, recapitulates criticisms of subjective value theory without answering the subjectivists’ responses concerning psychology, hedonism, and utilitarianism. Against Zeisl, he reasserts the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism and challenges the critic to devise a workable system. This passage invokes an earlier proof rather than supplying it anew.
Finally, Mises grants some clarification and convergence while insisting that a substantial gulf remains. Answering Spiethoff, he offers to replace “historical school” with “empirical-realist tendency,” but retains the substantive charge that economic laws are being displaced by appeals to social power. The preceding discussion of unemployment exemplifies the failure: it neglected wages and treated a problem of exchange without the theory of exchange. Value and price theory is, for Mises, economics’ central achievement, capable of warning against inflationary and interventionist errors. The closing sentence condenses his answer to demands for greater proximity to life:
Je reiner und abstrakter die Theorie ist, desto besser dient sie dem Leben und Wirken.
English translation: The purer and more abstract the theory is, the better it serves life and action.
Abstraction here is not withdrawal from practical affairs. It is the means of identifying consequences that immediate observation and policy intentions alone cannot establish.
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