In Addition to His Famous “Law of Markets,” Jean-Baptiste Say Was a Pioneer in Praxeological Methodology

The praxeological tradition has a long history in economic thought. We will indicate briefly the outstanding figures in the development of that tradition, especially since these economic methodologists and their views have been recently neglected by economists steeped in the positivist world view.

One of the first self-conscious methodologists in the history of economics was the early-nineteenth-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say. In the lengthy introduction to his magnum opus, A Treatise on Political Economy, Say laments that people

are too apt to suppose that absolute truth is confined to the mathematics and to the results of careful observation and experiment in the physical sciences; imagining that the moral and political sciences contain no invariable facts of indisputable truth, and therefore cannot be considered as genuine sciences, but merely hypothetical systems.

Say could easily have been referring to the positivists of our day, whose methodology prevents them from recognizing that absolute truths can be arrived at in the social sciences, when grounded, as they are in praxeology, on broadly evident axioms. Say insists that the “general facts” underlying what he calls the “moral sciences” are undisputed and grounded on universal observation.

—Murray N. Rothbard, “Praxeology as the Method of the Social Sciences,” in Economic Controversies (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011), 42.