lOOKS
317
at one point that "praxeology deals (also) with states of affairs
which, although not real in the present and past world, could
pos–
sibly become real at some future date," I have found no sensible
forecast of the future in any of his recent writings. In fact, the time
dimension seems to be entirely absent from his speculations, which
follow the
"If
this, then that" model of reasoning with ultra-scho–
lastic punctilio. The fallacy in von Mises' Olympian position seems
to me to reside
in
the fact that he does not realize that every con–
ditional judgment of the if/then type entails, willy-nilly, certain
substantive assumptions-if only to the extent that any practical
contingency which the social scientist considers unsound is not pre–
sented by him even under the hypothetical mode. Since von Mises
dismisses not only Utopianism but simple meliorism
in
economic
matters as sheer lunacy, the range of his conditional exemplars
turns out to be narrow indeed. Because his
its
never exceed the
comfortable bounds of laissez faire economics, his consequents open
up no new avenues to that economic understanding which (on his
own admission) must be an aspect of man's understanding of
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