Mises: Historicism

"The ideas of historicism can be understood only if one takes into account that they sought exclusively one end: to negate everything that rationalist social philosophy and economics had established....To the statement of the economists, that there is an inevitable scarcity of nature-given factors upon which human well-being depends, they opposed the fantastic assertion that there is abundance and plenty. What brings about poverty and want, they say, is the inadequacy of social institutions."

--Ludwig von Mises. Theory and History