Bergson and Austrian Economics. Pragmatism, Logic, etc.

thelion — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:43:20 GMT

Reading Time and Free Will, I get the sense that Bergson came close in the late nineteenth century to ordinal notion of pleasure or utility, and the Austrian use of the time concept. However, there are the usual distractions as in any non-economic work of a psychologist: Bergson picks his examples very fuzzily and in my opinion arbitrarily.

His ideas of time are also backward-looking, however, not forward looking. In his topic of that essay I guess it doesn't matter, but it certainly does in economics.

So, did Bergson later really go the way of pragmatism in logic and social theory, i.e. become anti-economic theory? Did Bergson become a thorough positivist like Morris Cohen wrote of him in 1931? I did not read his later writings (they have no relevance at all to economics, unlike Time and Free Will).

Can anyone who is also familiar with Bergson state his opinion?

Economics Questions

Bergson and Austrian Economics. Pragmatism, Logic, etc.