Aristotle, Menger, Mises: an essay in the metaphysics of economics

There are, familiarly, a range of distinct and competing accounts of the methodological underpinnings of Menger's work. These include Leibnizian, Kantian, Millian, and even Popperian readings; but they include also readings of an Aristotelian sort, and I have myself made a number of contributions in clarification and defense of the latter. I Not only, I have argued, does the historical situation in which Menger found himself point to the inevitability of the Aristotelian reading;2 this reading fits also very naturally to the text of Menger's works. 3 The diversity of interpretations is not, however, entirely surprising. It is on the one hand a consequence of the fact that Menger broke new ground in economic theory in part by fashioning new linguistic instruments not yet readily capable of unambiguous interpretation. It reflects further a lack of knowledge on the part of historians of economic thought of the most recent scholarship on nineteenthand twentiethcentury Austrian philosophy and on the role of Aristotelianism therein. 4 Still more importantly, perhaps, it reflects the fact that Aristotelian ways of thinking were for so long alien to the modern philosophical and scientific mind. For non-Aristotelian readings were advanced above all