 Hello, everybody. I think we'll get started now. I wanted to recommend a book on the topic of theory and history. This will be a big surprise. The book on the topic theory and history is by Von Mises. It's called Theory and History. This actually, I recommend this book very highly. It's the last of the four major works of Mises. Remember, he had the Theory of Money and Credit in 1912, then there's Socialism, 1922, Human Action, 1949, and Theory and History. This is the last of his major works. And it's one advantage is many people find Mises rather hard to read. The Human Action, especially say the first 140 pages or so, is not exactly the easiest book you've ever will encounter, at least unless you're unlike most people. But Theory and History is a very easy book to read. At least it's easier than the others. So I think this is, if you find Mises difficult, this is a very good book to read. And it was also one that Friedrich Hayek thought very highly of this book. I remember he told me in 1969 how much he admired this book. So this is a very good book to look at. Now, I want to distinguish, when we talk about Theory and History, we'll be talking about philosophy of history. I want to distinguish two different meanings of philosophy of history. And these correspond to two different meanings of the word history. When we're talking about history, we can refer to particular events in the past, significant events in the past, say, we're talking about the history of Europe, the history of the American Civil War, what we mean, what events were taking place. We're talking about what the historical actors did in the things that were done in the Latin phrase, the race gesti, the things that were done. But we can also mean by history the activities of writings of historians who were writing about these events. So sometimes it's called historiography, writing of history. So if you could get, say, a book on the history of the American Civil War, which would deal not so much with the events of the Civil War, but would give you what various historians have said about it and what their different interpretations were. There is a book I would recommend. A book there is a very interesting one, I think, called The History of Historical Writing by Harry Elmer Barnes. It's not always reliable, but Barnes was someone that Murray Rothbard knew he was a rather eccentric historian. He had very controversial views on World War I and World War II, but if you're interested in the history of historical writing, that would be a good book, a good book to read. One story about Barnes, I'll just throw in, as you know from now, I like digressions. When I was in high school, I once called up Harry Elmer Barnes, who was fairly old at that time. I asked him what he thought of the 1964 election. That was the one where Barry Goldwater was the very right-wing candidate, was running against Lyndon Johnson. He said, as my old friend Henry Menken said, I think I'll sit this one out. Okay, so corresponding to these two meanings of history, namely the events of the past and the activities of historians in writing about them, we have two meanings for philosophy of history. Philosophy of history can refer to the view that there's some pattern to all of history. There's some meaning to the whole series of historical events. So in addition to the history of Europe, history of the United States, there is a meaning to the total process of history. Depending on how much time we have in the lecture, I'll say a little bit about some of these philosophies of history. Later examples would be the Marxist theory of history. There's a claim that there's a whole meaning or pattern to history based on the development of the forces of production throughout history, that this will lead from a stage of primitive communism to socialism as the forces develop. So this is claiming there's a pattern to all of history. Marx wasn't the only one who had a philosophy of history in this sense. Hegel had one very famously. Oswald Spangler declined the West. An example of a philosophy of history is anyone read Spangler. It's very much worth reading. Decline the West, that's very good. Another one, Arnold Toynbee study of history. So there are various people who claim there's a whole pattern to history and philosophy of history in that sense. It would be explained that. So you see how this corresponds to this history in the first sense. I just think the philosophy of history would be trying to talk about the meaning of historical events. Now corresponding to the second sense, which was the activities of historians, philosophy of history means an investigation of some of the problems and methods that the historian uses in trying to understand the past. So this doesn't at all assume that there's a pattern to all of history, but in this sense of philosophy of history, which is the one we'll be concentrating on in this lecture, we're talking about philosophical problems concerned with historical knowledge. What is the nature of historical knowledge? How is the historian able to know the past if in fact he is able to know the past? There are some people who question this, who are very skeptical. There was a philosopher, Jack Miland, who had a book, who's very critical of the notion of historical knowledge, but this is the sort of thing we're studying in this type of philosophy of history. Now the first point I want to cover in philosophy of history in this sense is how can the historian use praxeology in helping to explain historical events? Now you'll remember from my first lecture and from other lectures and readings you have, that praxeology is a science of human action. It deals with action as such, generality of action doesn't tell you about particular actions. It doesn't say people are now, you couldn't have a praxeological theorem that people are now attending my lecture. That's a particular fact. It isn't deducible from any of the praxeological theorems that any particular event takes place or will take place. So then the question would be, well that's the case, what use is praxeology to the historian? And one way in which praxeology is useful is that although the historian can't deduce particular events from praxeology, he can use praxeology to help him explain particular events. For example, if you look at Murray Rothbard's book, America's Great Depression, which came out in 1963. It's on the origins of the 1929 depression. What he does there is he applies Austrian business cycle theory, which is derived from praxeology. And this, because he knows Austrian praxeology, this gives him clues as to what to look at in trying to understand the depression. For example, in Austrian business cycle theory, Roger Garrison and others have covered this in their lectures. In Austrian business cycle theory, the boom starts because banks have expanded bank credit so that the interest rate falls below the, what's called the natural rate of interest, which is determined by time preference. So as money becomes available with a lower interest rate, this encourages investors to embark on projects that they otherwise wouldn't have. And then when the credit expansion stops, these projects prove to be unsustainable, and the liquidation of these projects is the depression. That's when the bank credit expansion proves to be is no longer effective. The interest rate returns to the natural rate as determined by time preference. So these malinvestments collapse. Now, if say Rothbard, when he, of course, he knew about this theory, so what he was looking for when he was trying to explain the depression was, he was looking for, was there an expansion of bank credit in the 1920s? And he found that there was. He argues in the book that the Federal Reserve system, largely under the influence of the Governor of the Bank of New York, Benjamin Strong, was engaged in a monetary expansion that caused the process that the Austrian business cycle theory is talking about. And you can see how the Austrian theory has guided him, because if he didn't have the Austrian theory, if he were just looking at prices, say just looking at price date, prices really didn't go up very much in the 20s. So if the, if the historian wasn't aware of the Austrian theory, probably wouldn't be looking for expansionary monetary policy. But because Rothbard's aware and makes use of this theory, he's looking for that and then he can say, well, even if prices aren't going up that much, we would think that otherwise they would have gone down. So he's guided by the Austrian, Austrian theory in, by praxeology in carrying out his research. Now, oh, incidentally, I should say on that book, America's Great Depression, that's another book everyone should read. This will show you how old I am. I remember very well when the book came out in 1963. So probably most of you were not born at that time. Maybe some of your parents weren't born at that time. But I want, I remember it very well and I read it when it came out. And this is another book that Friedrich Hayek thought very highly of. He told me that he thought Rothbard had done a really good job in this book. Now, another example is where showing how the historian can use praxeology is in the brief account, finding the brief account of the decline of the Roman Empire that Mises provides in human action. And what Mises stresses there is that because of price controls imposed by in the late Roman Empire, this disrupted the commercial activity. There had been a very active economy, extensive commercial exchanges that were going on previously. But the price control really disrupted things so that production tended to be confined to the large estates, the latifundias, and the economy really regressed. It was no longer engaged. The worldwide trade greatly was greatly reduced. Used in this weakened, the Roman Empire couldn't adequately respond to the various invasions, whereas previously the Roman Empire had been able to overcome them. And here Mises was relying on a famous work by Michael Rostovsev, who was a Russian historian who had gone into exile after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He lived in the United States. The book is called The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire. So, here again we see Mises is applying, practically out of here, the basic point in economic theory, namely how wage and price controls can disrupt the working of the market in explaining a historical event. Now, one point to note is that just as the historian guided by praxeology will be applying Austrian insights to explain historical events, but remember, not all historians or praxeologists, historians who have other theories will be applying those theories to help them understand the past. So, this can lead to differences of opinion. For example, at the same year that Rothbard's Great Depression came out in 1963, there was another book that came out by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz called A Monetary History of the United States, and this book was much more influential on mainstream economists, my point of view, unfortunately, than Rothbard's book. But what Friedman was a follower, believed in the quantity theory of money, and what he thought was that depression had come about because the Fed really contracted the money supply drastically after the stock market crash. And he thought they're doing this had meant that what was sort of just a bad fall in the stock market became a major depression. So on his theory, he's looking for contractions of money supply. So you see, this is just the other way from Rothbard stressing expansion of the money supply in the 1920s. So Friedman and Schwartz are saying no, the important thing is the contraction of the money supply when the depression started. So you see here how the different theories guide the historian in looking for data in trying to figure out what happened. Rothbard doesn't think that the Fed did contract the money supply. He said, well, there was a contraction, but the Fed was just reacting to people worth drawing money from circulation. They weren't trying deliberately to contract the money supply. Here again, you see how the different theories guide what the historian is doing. Now, another example where different theories, showing how different theories affect or influence what the historian is doing, concerns the interpretation of fascism. Now, according to the Marxist view, which was the prevailing, probably prevailing view of fascism in the 1930s and 40s among historians, fascism is a stage of capitalism. In the Marxist interpretation, large monopolies will tend to arise in the capitalist system. And because of the capitalist system proves unable to cope with economic crisis and rising protests and strikes by workers. So there's a resort to an authoritarian system where leaders suppress the workers and regiment everyone under the control of a big business interest. And also in pursuit of markets in this Marxist view, the fascist government tends to follow an imperialist foreign policy. So in the Marxist interpretation, it's really the big business that's in control. This is the source of fascism. But Mises rejected this view as you might expect. In his view, he said, well, the Nazi system was not one that was dominated by big business. On the contrary, in the Nazi economy, the government was telling the businesses what to do. The government was really setting the prices and wages in the business people, although they in theory own their businesses really had to do whatever the government said. So they were really just government officials. They weren't independent operators. So it wasn't at all the case as the Marxists say that the it was the big business that was in control. So there was a book if you're interested in the Marxist view. There was a book by Franz Neumann called Behemoth came out Oxford, I think in the 1940s, probably the most influential statement of the Marxist view. And then a book if you want the Mises interpretation of fascism and Nazis, you should look at omnipotent government which came out in 1944. That's one of the best books I think on the history of 20th century. I think if I had to give one book on the interpretation of the Nazis and totalitarianism, I think I would recommend that one. The omnipotent government. So what I've said so far is showing how praxeology will help the historian because the historian can apply praxeology to help him explain concrete historical events. Now this is a more instance of a more general point, which is that Mises gives the historian will apply the results of the sciences in helping him explain events. And I give one example. I mentioned this in an earlier lecture also, but I'll give it again. Mises gives the example. He said supposing the historian was trying to explain the witchcraft craze at various periods in European history, say in late 16th century. There was widespread accusations of witchcraft in Europe. There were people put on trial and some cases burned at the stake because they were witches. Incidentally, in America, there was a witchcraft scare, but no one in America was ever burned for witchcraft. The witches were hanged and not burned. You'll sometimes see that people make that mistake. But supposing the historian was trying to explain what was going on in these witchcraft crazes. So Mises said, well, one thing that 20th century historian wouldn't do would be to say what was going on unless the devil was really in communication with these various women. And it happened to be an upsurge in their activities in this period. And he said, well, we wouldn't, this 20th century historian wouldn't do that because based on modern science, we don't believe in the people in communication with the devil in this way. I thought it was a bit odd that he picked this example because as it happens, one of the greatest 20th century historians of witchcraft was a rather odd character. Now, if I say someone's an odd character, you can be sure they're really odd. But his name was Montague Summers. He was claimed to be an Anglican priest, but there was some doubt whether he was really was one. But he wrote in his books on history of witchcraft, he took exactly, which were 20th century, he took exactly the view that Mises said no 20th century historian would take. He said, well, these people really were in communication with the devil. Now, of course, Mises would just say he shouldn't have done that. He was not acting as a good historian doing that. But nevertheless, he got exactly what he did do. Now, one thing about praxeology to returning to a point I made at the beginning of the lecture is that praxeology doesn't enable you to predict particular events. For example, we know from the Austrian business cycle theory that credit expansion, we can explain the effects of credit expansion, but we couldn't from just from Austrian business cycle theory deduce what, how much of an expansion, what these exactly these effects are quantitatively, what they're going to be or who would do something who wouldn't do something else. We can't deduce particular details from just from praxeology. So this of course raises the question, well, if we can't use praxeology, how is the historian going to explain particular historical events? Because after all, history consists of particular actions by particular people and historians trying to explain these. One way would be to agree with Henry Ford and give up Henry Ford said history is bunk. But if you don't want to do that, then you have a problem of historical explanation. So just as a matter of interest, Mises, as you know, was usually a very strong critic of the logical posthumist. Remember the logical posthumist said Mises was wrong in thinking that you can get genuine knowledge through a priori truth. Remember an a priori truth is one that you can know to be true apart from testing you just think about it and you see that it's true. So the logical posthumist rejected this, but Mises said praxeology consists of a priori truth. But he agreed with them that you can't get knowledge of contingent historical facts from just by thinking about it. A contingent fact would be one that might not have happened. For example, you're in this room now, probably regret that you are, but you might not have been. You might have gone somewhere else, be better off if you had, but that's not my problem, is it? So supposing we have something, so if a fact is contingent, if it might not have happened, then Mises, here he's agreeing with logical posthumist, he thought you couldn't deduce it from some general body of theory. You can't just think about someone say, well, he's going to be attending this lecture or he's going somewhere else. That would be something you could just know, just by empirically. So then again, the question is, well, how do you explain these contingent events? Now, one possibility, well, could we have historical laws that weren't praxeological, remember praxeological laws are a priori truth, we get them just by thinking about the concept of action or the action axiom. So supposing we can't do that historical events are contingent, they need not have happened. So could we have historical laws? And Mises says no, we couldn't. Why is that? Well, he says if there were historical laws, then they'd be derived by induction. So the historian would get a whole lot of events and then kind of study them to see whether there's any pattern in them. Is there any generalization can be based on amassing a great deal of historical data. And Mises, for various reasons, thought that, which I'll get into, I hope, thought that the historian couldn't do that. And one of the most important reasons Mises thought the historian couldn't come up with inductive laws, remember these would not be praxeological laws, they would be laws based on generalizations, just looking at data and seeing patterns. Well, he said that human beings have free will, that we always have a choice of action involves choice. So this if action involves choice where the actor is choosing alternative, this severely limits, if not takes away altogether the ability of someone to come up with historical laws because the historical actors have freedom in deciding what to do. He takes human choice to be an ultimate, what he calls an ultimate given. I'll mention my great friend, Father James Sadoski, used to have an argument for free will was, we wouldn't have the concept of free will unless we had it. I once mentioned that to another friend of mine, Bob Nozick, who's very good on quick response, and Nozick said maybe we wouldn't have the concept of bad arguments unless we had them. But regardless of the success of that particular argument, Mises took it to be an ultimate given that we have free will. Now, if we can't come up with historical laws, it doesn't follow from that that the historian can't explain particular events. Now, you might think, well, how is that possible? Because when we explain something, doesn't that at least most often involve subsuming this under a general law? Say if we explain why did an object fall, say if I were to drop this, why would it fall on the floor? I'm not going to drop it because it would ruin the rest of my slides. Not ruin my access to the rest of the slide, but why would it fall? So you would explain this by applying the law of gravitation to this particular event. So if the historian can't use general laws, then how is he going to explain particular events? Well, what's left without general laws? Mises answers that the historian can grasp the individuality of an action without using general law. So in general laws, we're saying how does a particular event fall under some word general pattern? But what the historian is doing is just trying to grasp the individuality of the act, trying to grasp what the particular is doing without claiming that what the act is doing falls under general laws. I'm not saying what the historical act is doing. How does this relate to other events? It's just grasping the individuality of the action as such. Now, he calls this method of grasping the individuality. We use the German word for Stehen, which means understanding, sometimes calls it specific understanding, specific as opposed to general. We're getting the individuality of the action. Well, I've said that a large number of times, the individuality action, but that really doesn't give you a really good idea of what's involved. How is the historian supposed to grasp the individuality of the action? Well, what Mises suggests is that the person who's acting, the historical actor that the historian is concerned with, will have certain values and beliefs on the basis of which he acts. And because we ourselves are actors, we're everyone acts, we know what it's like to have particular beliefs and desires. So we can, by attributing certain beliefs or desires to the actor, we can make sense of what the person is doing. So just as, say, we act in a certain way, say, you want to have lunch, so you go down to the downstairs and get in the line and get your sandwich, get your anti-poison antidote afterwards. So we could explain what you're doing based on your beliefs and desires. So similarly, the historian can attribute beliefs and desires to historical actors, and that's the way he explains events. So what the historian is doing, he'll make what Mises called judgments of relevance about particular events. He'll say how there are various factors influencing the person, the historical actor. And the historian will, just by a process of sympathetic understanding, a specific understanding, he'll attribute beliefs and desires to a particular actor. So supposing as an example, the historian is trying to explain why Abraham Lincoln decided in, after he became president in March, 1861, he decided to reinforce the garrison for its sumter, even though he knew that doing so would probably mean that the fort would be attacked and the Civil War would result. So the historian could say, what beliefs and desires would the Lincoln have had that would explain why he did that? We could say, well, we know from his speeches and beliefs that he had, he believed that the Union couldn't be dissolved. States didn't have the power to leave the Union. He was a very strong nationalist. He wanted to promote American power. So if we attribute this, believed him, this can help explain why he decided to do that. So see here, the historian wouldn't be appealing to general laws. He's attributing particular desires and beliefs to Lincoln that would enable him to explain what's going on. Incidentally, you know what the manager of Ford's Theater said to Mrs. Lincoln the day after the assassination was, I'm sorry, Mrs. Lincoln, no ticket refunds under any circumstances. Don't put that in your notes. It won't be on the exam. Now one thing to mistake to avoid when I've been talking about this notion of sympathetic understanding, this does not repeat, not mean that the historian has to like what the actor's story has to sympathize with the historical actor in the sense of approving of what he does and taking a favorable attitude toward what he does. Say you're trying to explain Lincoln policy, and you say, well, Lincoln was trying to want a strong American national state. You don't have to think he was, if you're attributing that to Lincoln, you don't have to think, well, Lincoln was doing the right thing in that. And I mention this because one of the greatest philosophers, they arguably, the greatest contemporary philosopher, Saul Kripke, has in an essay, he criticized R.G. Collingwood, who had a view very like Mies. In fact, I may be getting to this later lecture, Collingwood was a British philosopher, and he had Mies' thought very highly of him, and he was somewhat influenced by Collingwood. But Collingwood had a theory like of a kind I've been explaining where the historian is trying to attribute beliefs and desires to the historical actor based on this kind of sympathetic understanding. So Kripke objects, he says, well, supposing historians trying to give an account of Hitler, wouldn't this lead to the historian was trying to get a sympathetic understanding of Hitler? Wouldn't this lead to the historian coming to like Hitler, coming to defend Hitler because he's trying to explain what he did? And Kripke gave us an example. There was a British military historian, David Irving, who wrote a book about World War II kind of from Hitler's point of view, which became very sympathetic to Hitler. So Kripke said, well, isn't this what's a danger in this method of specific understanding or sympathetic understanding? But you see here, I don't think that objection is right, because here what the historian is doing is attributing values to the historical actor, but the historian isn't adopting those values himself, the historian isn't making a value judgment of his own that these values are a good thing. The historian is engaged in a descriptive science. He's not making value judgments. And Mises says that history can be written in a value neutral way. So even if you're engaged in sympathetic understanding of what the historical actors are doing, this doesn't follow that you're trying to, you have to adopt the values you attribute to them. Now, one other mistake people make in thinking about this specific understanding for a stand is they think, well, if you're trying to understand someone's values and beliefs, then what are you going to be looking at? You'll be looking at what the person has said. You'll be looking at what he's speeches or writing. So doesn't this lead to taking what he says at face value? But it doesn't at all. The historian can still compare what the person has done with historical facts. You can point out that what someone said doesn't correspond to what he did. For example, say you're talking about Lincoln. You can say, well, if you say someone say attribute to Lincoln, the goal of freeing the slaves, you could say the Emancipation Proclamation really didn't do that. It was more of a military measure. So you could compare what someone says to what actually took place. And I mentioned, I have a note here, because I think there's an essay by me that's called The Treatment of Irrationality in Social Sciences, where this hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves, where it makes the criticism of the great medievalist Ernst Cantorovitz. Cantorovitz was a German historian who later went into exile and taught at Berkeley. And he says Cantorovitz, in his great biography of Frederick II, takes at face value the statements in the Holy Roman Empire, say statements by the various emperors and other people. And he talks about the symbolism of these statements. And Mises Krzysztof said, well, he doesn't really ask, did these statements correspond to reality? Did they correspond to the actual political power politics of a time? So I put that in to show that sympathetic understanding or specific understanding require you to accept what the historical actor said at face value. Incidentally, when Mises is very significant, I don't think it's people drawn attention to this. Cantorovitz, you see, was in this particular book. He was really, it was very much admired by the German nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s. And what Mises was doing, criticizing Cantorovitz, he's really, in a way, attacking the German nationalists. It was one of the readers of Cantorovitz's book. Great admirer of the book was Hitler. Hitler thought very highly of this particular book that Mises is criticising. It's somewhat ironic that Hitler liked the book because Cantorovitz was Jewish, but he thought highly of it. So I think what, I just throw this in as one of my typical digressions, that what Mises was doing was really, in this passage, is really criticising a type of German nationalist history writing. Now, as I mentioned, Mises, in developing this notion, his notion of first-aing or specific understanding, was influenced by the British historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood, Robin George Collingwood. Besides being a historian was also, and a philosopher was also an archaeologist. He was one of the leading archaeologists of Rome and Britain, but he's probably best known as a historian. So what Collingwood said, you can find this in a book that came out after his death called The Idea of History. It's edited by Sir Malcolm Knox, who had been one of his students, T.M. Knox. But what he said is that the historian, in trying to reconstruct the thoughts of someone in the past, is having the identical thoughts and desires of that person. So if, say, imagine a historian trying to understand what Lincoln's policy in March, 1861, if a historian is successful, he's thinking exactly the same thoughts as Lincoln. And when Collingwood said that, he meant that in a very extreme sense. It doesn't mean something like you're having qualitatively the same thoughts as Lincoln did. So say, imagine each of you is thinking about praxeology right now. What else would you be thinking about? So imagine each of you is thinking about praxeology. We could say you're thinking the same thing in meaning by that. The content is the same in each one of your mind. Collingwood went further than that. He said it's not only the same content, but it's numerically the same. It just is the same thought. So the historian is really, who's gotten Lincoln right, is thinking exactly Lincoln's thoughts. Mises didn't go that far. That view of identity is really something you find in the British idealist philosophy. But it's somewhat, as I say, somewhat extreme view. But that was Collingwood's view. And there were other philosophers and historians who wrote about first day. I just mentioned a few of them. They included German philosophers, Wilhelm Vindelband, Wilhelm Diltai, also, Heinrich Ricker, and the Italian Benedetto Croce. So there was a whole group of people. They didn't have identical views, either in the ordinary sense or in Collingwood sense. But a lot of people say in the late 19th, early 20th century, we're writing about first day and then historical understanding and Mises is in this tradition. Now, what about the people who reject first day and the logical positivists didn't say, okay, Mises is right. You know, we have to make special room for this kind of first day and specific understanding. They rejected what Mises said and what the people in this tradition said. And one of the most important of the positivist treatments of first day, and I wouldn't say this writer was a strict logical positivist, but he belongs in this group, was the philosopher of science, Ernest Nagel, who taught at Columbia. He was actually one of Murray Rothbard's teachers. Rothbard actually liked Nagel quite a bit, but he had a very important book called The Structure of Science. And what he said was, well, you can have this method of specific understanding if you want, but that might give you some idea of what was going on in history, could get some idea of why Lincoln thought something or other. But that doesn't give you any real reason to accept that what you come up with is true. All that you've got is some kind of story about what happened. The only way, according to the people who favor first day and of seeing whether it's true is just, does this seem to you to be right, say, imagine? And Mises, I think, would certainly admit this. Suppose you read some account of Lincoln's policy. So does this strike you as plausible? Does this particular attribution of motives and beliefs to Lincoln strike as a plausible one? And explaining what he did. If you answer yes, that's all that you have. So Nagel said, well, that really isn't scientific. That just depends on how particular people take something. It doesn't really tell you what's, give you a basis for accepting it. So first day may be a good way of generating hypotheses, but it doesn't address at all the problem of how testing them or verifying them or falsifying them. And what they said is what the historian is doing. Remember, this is just what Mises rejected. They said, what the historian should be doing is trying to come up with explaining an event through an appeal to a general law. The most important article in giving this view is, came out in 1942 by Carl Hempel, who was one of the, he'd been associated with the Vienna Circle and later taught at Princeton. He was one of Robert Nozick's teachers. Very good philosophy. Everyone, I recommend should read his book called Aspects of Scientific Explanation, which came out in 1965. But in his essay on the function of general laws in history in 1942, he advanced what was generally referred to, called the Covering Law Model. This is named given to it by another writer in philosophy of history, William H. Dre. And what Hempel said was, the way you explain, the way you explain an event is to bring it under a general law. So you would say, here's particular event, what general law applies here. And you explain the event by saying, this is an instance of this general law. And the problem with that, as I mentioned earlier, is that there aren't such general laws. So if you took that model, you really wouldn't be able to make a historical explanation. For example, supposing you're trying to explain why Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in 49 BC, where he disobeyed the order of the Roman Senate not to do that. Well, we don't have historical laws of the form. Ambitious generals were faced with an order that they think detracts from their honor, will disobey it. We don't have such general laws. All we could do is explain the particular action that Caesar took on that occasion. Now, one thing I just mentioned, I discussed this a little bit in my lecture, one of my lectures on Wednesday, is historian also uses in carrying out specific understanding or first aid uses what's called ideal types following. This is the term that Mises took over from Max Weber. And here ideal doesn't mean perfect. It means something not found in the real world. It's ideal in the sense of not actually existing. But it's what you do in an ideal type is you take an exaggerated, you bring together certain characteristic traits of something like a personality type. So you'll have the ideal type of the bourgeois and you'll attribute certain traits to him using that ideal type can help you explain particular historical events. I gave us the ideal type for the bourgeois. This would enable you to explain certain acts by various people in the same late 19th century who were engaged in business expansion. So you say, well, there you use the ideal type for the bourgeois who was interested in making a lot of money or achieving a certain position through wealth. And ideal types don't have strict definitions. They're just assemblages of characteristics that can be met or not met to varying degrees. Now, Max Weber thought that one ideal type was the rational actor. But remember, Mises doesn't agree with that. Mises says, no, every action is rational. So according to Max Weber, it's only specific kinds of action, kind is rational, but Mises didn't accept that. Now, the last thing I see, we're about out of time, but the last thing I'll mention is that remember when I started the lecture near the beginning, I mentioned this notion of philosophy of history in the sense of trying to come up with some kind of general pattern to all of history. And Mises is very unsympathetic to that notion because he thinks that the dominant kinds of philosophy of history in that sense contravene methodological individualism. Remember, methodological individualism is the principle that only individuals act. So we don't have, we're talking about collectives. They act only through individuals. And Mises points out that the most influential of the philosophies of history violate this. For example, in Hegel had the notion kind of the world spirit or geist as some kind of independent entity that was acting. Marx has the forces of production as if this is some kind of autonomous entity developing apart from individuals. And in Spengler's theory, you have cultures which Spengler compares to plants, not industrial plants, but biological plants, sort of organisms that have early stages, growth and decay. So in all these cases that Mises rejects them because they violate methodological individualism. So I don't want to violate the constraint of sticking to the right time. So I'll stop here and we're out of time. Thanks very much.