Kevin Carson on the Methodenstreit

Welcome to Mutual Exchange Radio, a project of the Center for a Stateless Society. I am your host, Zachary Woodman. Today's guest—for the third time on MER—is Kevin Carson. Kevin probably needs no introduction, but he is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He is an anarchist without adjectives, heavily influenced by autonomism and the new municipalist movements. His written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, and The Desktop Regulatory State all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things and The Art of the Possible, as well as his own blogs, Mutualist Blog and Tea, Earl Grey, Hot. Today, I Kevin is on to discuss his 2021 study on the Methodenstreit between economists from the Austrian school, such as Carl Menger, and economists from the German Historical School, such as Gustav Schmoller. We discuss Carson's views on the methodology of the social sciences in general and political economy in particular as well as his views on interest, landlordism, and the American Institutionalist school.