Nationalökonomie als Soziologie der kommerziellen Beziehungen

One of Hans Albert's main concerns is to deal with the unity of the social sciences. At the beginning of his academic career he addressed this issue in his work »Economics as a Sociology of Commercial Relations.« Advances in the field of scholarly knowledge can be seen as a perpetual phenomenon in the sense that there can be no »ideal final state« of knowledge. The key element of his criticism of economics is that its conclusions have avoided a critical test by reality due to the method of »Model Platonism.« As a result of Albert's analysis, the highly topical question regarding the theoretical and practical understanding of normativity also arises. Albert dealt with this as a problem of freedom from value judgments and at the same time searched for a bridge principle to overcome the distance between ought statements and factual statements.