Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I offer again Mises' characterization of choice: "All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference." --  Human Action Mises is explicitly stressing the notion that there is one kind of choice, and that all choices pick out an item from a "unique scale" of preferences. Collingwood say, "No, moral choices are of a distinct type from economic choices, although they are both purposeful." If we adopt Mises' view, we have to picture Jesus surveying an array of possibilities, engaged in considerations like: "Well, I certainly have a great absolute advantage at producing loaves and fishes. And I do think that Galile...

People who want to attack Mises's use of "praxeology" as some bizarre, idiosyncratic move on his part often fail to realize how common this sort of analysis was among philosophers in the early 20th century. Bradley, Bosanquet, Green, Croce, Collingwood, and Oakeshott all perform analyses similar to Mises, sometimes described as examining the presuppositions of human action. For instance, here is Green: "without intention there is no action... In saying then that the proper, because the only possible, function of law is to enforce performance of or abstinence from external actions , it is implied that its function is to produce or prevent certain intentions, for without intention on the part of someone there is no act." -- Principles of Political Obligation , pp. 18-19 I do think that Mises made two mistakes in this area: 1) There was no need for him to use the term "praxeology": this made what he was doing seem stranger than it needed to. (In f...

"Tragedy tells what cannot be told, the passage from what precedes action to properly human action. It tells of the passage to the city, the coming to be of the city. For the city enables one to act. The city is that ordering of the human world that makes action possible and meaningful." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 4