Post-classical political economy: Polity, society and economy in Weber, Mises and Hayek - Austrian School Perspectives - Max Weber, Ludwig Von Mises, Friedrich A. von Hayek

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Jan, 2002  by Peter J. Boettke,  Virgil Henry Storr

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As Storr argues, the success of these "pirate" industries and the celebration of the Bahamas' "pirate" past in ritual and folklore has profoundly affected the kinds of enterprises Bahamians pursue and has "created" an entrepreneur who is acutely "alert" to opportunities for profiteering. Rather than investing in good will, promoting customer service, attempting to innovate and compete or expanding their enterprises, for instance, Bahamian businessmen tend to offer poor service, to price gouge, and to pursue "rents" rather than profits. As Storr's effort demonstrates, development economics cannot be satisfied with approaches that refuse to locate the entrepreneur at the heart of the development process and fail to consider how actors are affected by and affect their cultural, historical and social contexts.

VII

Conclusion

THE CROSS-FERTILIZATION OF Weberian sociology and Austrian economics promises a way back from scientistic models of irrelevance in the social sciences and a return to the "life-world" of human existence. Similarly, reexamining the way that the society, the economy and the polity enter into their analysis not only moves us beyond the conceptions of embeddedness found in economic sociology, but puts an emphasis on the "meaning" that actors attach to their actions and to social phenomena. Individuals are neither disembodied from the institutions that shape and influence individual choice nor are institutions dissociated from the web of meaning that give them life. The excesses of both economism and historicism can be avoided, while the benefits of analytical structure and narrative detail can be exploited to render social phenomena intelligible.

Embracing the form of methodological individualism advocated here reveals the theoretical shortcomings of both standard economics and sociology. While sociology asks the interesting questions, it remains hobbled by a lack of analytical structure. And while economics possesses an analytical structure, it remains hobbled by an undue restriction of the questions it can ask. Both Weberian sociology and Austrian economics, however, overcome these deficiencies. Using criticisms of neoclassical conceptions of man, for instance, to dismiss Mises's and Hayek's understanding of the progressive influence of markets in social development simply does not engage the issue. Nor do critiques of naive holism "stick" to Weber's sociological conceptions.

The obstacles that prevent engaging the issues in the current dialogue over the economics and the sociology of the Weber-Austrian approach must simply be overcome. So, too, the obstacles that hinder the (re)infusing of Weberian and Austrian themes into the "new economic sociology." Indeed, the Weber-Austrian connection promises to avoid many of the pitfalls that plague their economic brethren and the "new sociology of economic life" and may represent what has appeared so elusive in the twentieth century: a social theory that is at once logically coherent, empirically useful, humanistic in its method and humanitarian in its concerns.