A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II Read Online Free PDF Page A

dispensing privileges and subsidies in the political arena to lie about their true motives, Rothbard formulates what he describes as “a theoretical guide which will indicate in advance whether or not a historical action will be predominantly for economic, or for ideological, motives.”39 Now, it is true that Rothbard derives this guide from his overall worldview. The historian’s worldview, however, should not be interpreted as a purely ideological construction or an unconscious reflection of his normative biases. In fact, every 36Rothbard, “Economic Determinism,” p. 4.
    37Ibid.
    38See, for example, David Eakins, “Business Planners and America’s Postwar Expansion,” in Corporations and the Cold War, David Horowitz, ed. (New York: Modern Reader, 1969), pp. 143–71.
    39Rothbard, “Economic Determinism,” p. 4.

    Introduction
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    historian must be equipped with a worldview—an interrelated set of ideas about the causal relationships governing how the world works—in order to ascertain which facts are relevant in the explanation of a particular historical event. According to Rothbard, “Facts, of course, must be selected and ordered in accordance with judgments of importance, and such judgments are necessarily tied into the historian’s basic world outlook.”40
    Specifically, in Mises’s approach to history, the worldview comprises the necessary preconceptions regarding causation with which the historian approaches the data and which are derived from his knowledge of both the aprioristic and natural sciences. According to Mises:
    History is not an intellectual reproduction, but a condensed representation of the past in conceptual terms. The historian does not simply let the events speak for themselves. He arranges them from the aspect of the ideas underlying the formation of the general notions he uses in their presentation. He does not report facts as they happened, but only relevant facts. He does not approach the documents without presuppositions, but equipped with the whole apparatus of his age’s scientific knowledge, that is, with all the teachings of contemporary logic, mathematics, praxeology, and natural science.41
    So, for example, the fact that heavy speculation against the German mark accompanied its sharp plunge on foreign-exchange markets is not significant for an Austrian-oriented economic historian seeking to explain the stratospheric rise in commodity prices that characterized the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s. This is because he approaches this event armed with the supply-and-demand theory of money and the purchasing-power–parity theory of the exchange rate.
    40Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, vol. 1, A New Land, A New People: The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1999), p. 9.
    41Mises, Human Action , pp. 47–48.

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    A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II
    These “presuppositions” derived from praxeology lead him to avoid any attribution of causal significance to the actions of foreign exchange speculators in accounting for the precipitous decline of the domestic purchasing power of the mark. Instead they direct his attention to the motives of the German Reichsbank in expanding the money supply. In the same manner, a modern historian investigating the cause and dissemination of bubonic plague in fourteenth-century Europe would presuppose that the blossoming of religious heresy during that period would have no significance for his investigation.
    Instead he would allow himself to be guided by the conclusions of modern medical science regarding the epidemiology of the disease.
    The importance of Rothbard’s theoretical guide is that it adds something completely new to the historian’s arsenal of scientific preconceptions that aids him in making judgments of relevance when investigating the motives of those who promote or oppose specific political actions. The