Criticism of Positivism

Positivism and social engineering are the great idols that indirectly provoked all the conflicts, genocides, etc., that devastated humanity in the twentieth century. Therefore, it is my responsibility to express to you my criticism of positivism. Hayek refers to positivism as “scientism,” and he defines it as follows. He says that scientism is the indiscriminate and undue application of the method of the natural sciences to the field of economics and the social sciences, or human action. Why is there a desire to apply the method of physics and the natural sciences to the sphere of human action and economics, when it’s now so obvious, in light of all we’ve said, that an abyss separates the world of human beings from the world of plants? Well, there are many reasons. Economists have always had an inferiority complex with respect to natural scientists. Economists have watched as bridges were built, man walked on the moon, and illnesses were eradicated, and it frustrates economists that they can’t do the same: be engineers of a sort, who with their knowledge and will, and with the power of the state, would solve every problem. So, dazzled by the illusion that copying the method of physicists would enable them to achieve the same results, economists insist on applying to their own field a method that is foreign to it, and the consequences for society are disastrous. Indeed, I repeat, all the conflicts, wars, and genocide that have afflicted humanity, all you can imagine, have sprung from this methodological error. For ideas ultimately drive the world.