Rothbard quotes Popper

One of the interesting non-engagements of the 20th century was the standoff between two of the most outstanding intellectual figures to emerge from Vienna, namely Mises and Popper. There may have been some anecdotal stuff about their fleeting contacts because they were both founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society but next to nothing has come to my attention.

The Mises Institute has circulated a Rothbard paper as an email attachment, "Praxeology as the method of the social sciences" first published in a collection of papers in 1973 and later in his own book The Logic of Action One (1977).

The gist of the paper is that the social sciences have been led astray by the positivist method of physics and they need to take on board the 'a priori' certainties and the praxeology of Mises, which he traced back to Cairnes and Senior.

Rothbard did not mention Popper as a critic of positivism. Some would say that the problem was not so much the embrace of the method of physics but rather it was the particular kind of philosophy of physics that came to dominate the philosophy of science, with determinism, subjectivism, inductivism etc.

Leaving that aside, a passage in Rothbard's paper relates to the impossibility of making exact predictions about the future. There is a footnote "We may mention here the well-known refutation of the notion of predicting the future by Karl Popper...The Poverty of Historicism pp vi-viii.)

It is a pity that Rothbard did not draw any comparison between praxeology and the method of situational analysis that Popper sketched in the Poverty.