Rationalities and Their Limits: Reconstructing Neurath’s and Mises’s Prerequisites in the Early Socialist Calculation Debates

Alexander Linsbichler

A chapter in Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology: Including A Symposium on Carl Menger at the Centenary of His Death, 2021, vol. 39B, pp 95-128 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: Austrian economist Ludwig Mises’s central role in the socialist calculation debates has been consensually acknowledged since the early 1920s. Yet, only recently Nemeth, O’Neill, Uebel, and others have drawn particular attention to Mises’s encounter with logical empiricist Otto Neurath. Despite several surprising agreements, Neurath and Mises certainly provide different answers to the questions “what is meant by rational economic theory” (Neurath) and whether “socialism is the abolition of rational economy” (Mises). Previous accounts and evaluations of the exchange between Neurath and Mises suffer from attaching little regard to their idiosyncratic uses of the term “rational.” The paper at hand reconstructs and critically compares the different conceptions of rationality defended by Neurath and Mises. The author presents two different resolutions to a detected tension in Mises’s deliberations on rationality: the first is implicit in Neurath’s, O’Neill’s, and Salerno’s reading of Mises and faces several interpretational problems; the author proposes a divergent interpretation. Based on the reconstructions of Neurath’s and Mises’s conceptions of rationality, the author suggests some implications with respect to Viennese Late Enlightenment and the socialist calculation debates.

Keywords: Ludwig Mises; Otto Neurath; rationality; socialist calculation debates; Viennese Late Enlightenment; welfare economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:rhetzz:s0743-41542021000039b008

DOI: 10.1108/S0743-41542021000039B008

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