Rothbard on Scientism | Mises Institute

Murray Rothbard’s “The Mantle of Science,” is an immensely rich paper, and in what follows, I’m going to discuss a few of the many ideas in it. The key point in the paper is that human beings cannot properly be studied by the methods of the physical sciences, because humans are conscious and engage in choice. This point, which is of course the basis of praxeology, will be familiar to most readers, but many of the arguments Rothbard gives for this thesis are startling.

We can see, for example, why Rothbard liked Hans Hoppe’s “performative contradictions” so much. Drawing from the Scholastics, Rothbard used the same type of argument, called an argument from retortion, in this essay, which originally appeared in 1960. In this type of argument, someone’s thesis is shown to be false by the very fact that he advances it. As Rothbard puts it, using the example of the denial of free will:

If we are determined in the ideas we accept, then X, the determinist, is determined to believe in determinism, while Y, the believer in free will, is also determined to believe in his own doctrine. Since man’s mind is, according to determinism, not free to think and come to conclusions about reality, it is absurd for X to try to convince Y or anyone else of the truth of determinism. In short, the determinist must rely, for the spread of his ideas, on the nondetermined, free-will choices of others, on their free will to adopt or reject ideas. In the same way, the various brands of determinists—behaviorists, positivists, Marxists, and so on—implicitly claim special exemption for themselves from their own determined systems. But if a man cannot affirm a proposition without employing its negation, he is not only caught in an inextricable self-contradiction; he is conceding to the negation the status of an axiom.

Rothbard extends the point to other views that are inconsistent with their own advocacy. In brief, if you want to defend a position, you must make room for your own defense of it:

Thus, the determinist, to advocate his doctrine, must place himself and his theory outside the allegedly universally determined realm, that is, he must employ free will. This reliance of determinism on its negation is an instance of a wider truth: that it is self-contradictory to use reason in any attempt to deny the validity of reason as a means of attaining knowledge. Such self-contradiction is implicit in such currently fashionable sentiments as “reason shows us that reason is weak,” or “the more we know, the more we know how little we know.”

I must say that I’m not sure that the examples are good illustrations of the point. Maybe reason is weak but is strong enough to show that it is limited, and maybe one of the things we do know is that we know very little. Are these contradictory assertions? I’m not immediately seeing that they are, but I’m not prepared to say that Rothbard is mistaken. That would indeed be a risky business.

Rothbard unmasks a paradox in a great deal of scientistic thinking. Those who deny that human beings are conscious, even though they self-evidently are conscious, at the same time treat society as conscious, when it obviously isn’t. It is useful, Rothbard says, to translate expressions having the form “society does such-and-such” to “certain individuals do such-and-such.”

The organismic analogies attribute consciousness, or other organic qualities, to “social wholes” which are really only labels for the interrelations of individuals. Just as in the mechanistic metaphors, individual men are subsumed and determined, here they become mindless cells in some sort of social organism. While few people today would assert flatly that “society is an organism,” most social theorists hold doctrines that imply this. Note, for example, such phrases as: “Society determines the values of its individual members”; or “The individual’s actions are determined by the role he plays in the group to which he belongs,” and so on. Such concepts as “the public good,” “the common good,” “social welfare,” and so on, are also endemic. All these concepts rest on the implicit premise that there exists, somewhere, a living organic entity known as “society,” “the group,” “the public,” “the community,” and that that entity has values and pursues ends.

Not only are these terms held up as living entities; they are supposed to exist more fundamentally than mere individuals, and certainly “their” goals take precedence over individual ones. It is ironic that the self-proclaimed apostles of “science” should pursue the sheer mysticism of assuming the living reality of these concepts. Such concepts as “public good,” “general welfare,” and so on, should, therefore, be discarded as grossly unscientific, and the next time someone preaches the priority of “public good” over the individual good, we must ask: Who is the “public” in this case?

With his keen eye for conceptual incongruities, Rothbard notes that economists claim to be wertfrei—value-free—when in fact they are not. Instead of trying to work out a science of ethics, they mistakenly assume that to be value-free means to adopt the prevailing values of a society. But to adopt this course of action is itself to make a value judgment:

Ever since Max Weber, the dominant position in the social sciences, at least de jure, has been Wertfreiheit: that science itself must not make value judgments, but confine itself to judgments of fact, since ultimate ends can be only sheer personal preference not subject to rational argument. The classical philosophical view that a rational (that is, in the broad sense of the term, a “scientific”) ethic is possible has been largely discarded. As a result, the critics of Wertfreiheit, having dismissed the possibility of rational ethics as a separate discipline, have taken to smuggling in arbitrary, ad hoc ethical judgments through the back door of each particular science of man. The current fashion is to preserve a façade of Wertfreiheit, while casually adopting value judgments, not as the scientist’s own decision, but as the consensus of the values of others. Instead of choosing his own ends and valuing accordingly, the scientist supposedly maintains his neutrality by adopting the values of the bulk of society. In short, to set forth one’s own values is now considered biased and “nonobjective,” while to adopt uncritically the slogans of other people is the height of “objectivity.” Scientific objectivity no longer means a man’s pursuit of truth wherever it may lead, but abiding by a Gallup poll of other, less informed subjectivities. . . It should be realized that values do not become true or legitimate because many people hold them; and their popularity does not make them self-evident. Economics abounds in instances of arbitrary values smuggled into works the authors of which would never think of engaging in ethical analysis or propounding an ethical system. The virtue of equality, as we have indicated, is simply taken for granted without justification; and it is established, not by sense perception of reality or by showing that its negation is self-contradictory—the true criteria of self-evidence—but by assuming that anyone who disagrees is a knave and a rogue.

I have been able to give only a small sample of the profusion of arguments in “The Mantle of Science.” Rothbard’s lightning-fast mind and great learning are evident, and readers should see for themselves how Rothbard dismantles the mantle of science.