'The death knell is now tolling for the mathematical and positivist pretenders to the mainstream of economics.'

...The time is now ripe for Austrians to recover their rightful position as the true representatives of the central tendency of modern economic theory by affirming the praxeological method as the research method of economics. The prodigious fruits of this method stand before us in the integrated theoretical structure expounded in Man, Economy, and State.'


<blockquote>'...Misesian or praxeological paradigm, to which the present author adheres.'
- Rothbard


'Rothbard’s primary mission in writing his treatise, which has to purge modern economic science of its alien positivist and mathematical formalist elements and to reconstruct it along consistently causal-realist lines. It cannot be stated too often or too emphatically that engineering a radical break from standard economic theory and establishing a heterodox school of thought that rejected all forms of equilibrium analysis and the use of imaginary constructs was not Rothbard’s purpose in writing Man, Economic, and State. Indeed, as we have seen, one of Rothbard’s most important contributions in his treatise is his painstaking explication of the content and the proper use of fictitious constructs and imaginary states of the world in deriving meaningful propositions about the causal determinants of observable economic phenomena. (page xlvii)

...

Fortunately, Man, Economy, and State points the way out of this morass of confusion, which threatens permanent and wholesale marginalization of all branches of Austrian economics. Every page of Rothbard’s treatise is imbued with a profound awareness that the causal-realist theoretical system that he was expounding was in the mainstream of an international economic tradition that originated in the Marginalist Revolution. His treatise thus was not intended as the program for a new heterodox movement or the revival of an old one; rather it represented an endeavor to reconstruct orthodox economics on the unshakeable foundation of the praxeological method and to use this method to substantively advance the theory. In a crucial sense, economic science had temporarily lost its bearings and was beginning to stray from its rich heritage and Rothbard aimed at setting it back on course. Consequently, he never conceded the mainstream of economic science to the disciples of mathematical modeling and the positivist method, whom he regarded as an irrationalist cult that had hijacked economics and whose silly doctrines would sooner or later wind up in the dustbin of intellectual history.

Rothbard has been proven correct. Mathematical modeling has revealed itself to be a vain and formalistic exercise incapable of explaining the international currency crises, stock-market and real-estate bubbles, and the global financial crises that have wracked our world in the past two decades. It is increasingly evident even to professional economists that the tortuous positivist detour has led to an intellectual dead end. Hence, bizarre heterodox sects such as behavioral economics, experimental economics, the “happiness” literature, neuro-economics, etc., now abound. Some market-oriented economists have even abandoned modern economic theory altogether for the less rigorous rhetoric and metaphors of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and Hayek’s “spontaneous order.”

The death knell is now tolling for the mathematical and positivist pretenders to the mainstream of economics. The time is now ripe for Austrians to recover their rightful position as the true representatives of the central tendency of modern economic theory by affirming the praxeological method as the research method of economics. The prodigious fruits of this method stand before us in the integrated theoretical structure expounded in Man, Economy, and State.'
- Joseph T. Salerno, INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION OF MAN, ECONOMY, AND STATE WITH POWER AND MARKET, page xlix & l</blockquote>