A History of Economic Doctrines / from the time of the physiocrats to the present day

by Charles Gide; Charles Rist

CHAPTER I: THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL AND THE CONFLICT OF METHODS

The second half of the nineteenth century is dominated by Historical ideas, though their final triumph was not fully established until the last quarter of the century. The rise of these ideas, however, belongs to a still earlier period, and dates from 1843, when there appeared a small volume by Roscher entitled Grundriss. We shall have to return to that date if we wish to understand the ideas of the school and to appreciate their criticisms.

The successors of J. B. Say and Ricardo gave a new fillip to the abstract tendency of the science by reducing its tenets to a small number of theoretical propositions. The problems of international exchange, of the rate of profits, wages, and rent, were treated simply as a number of such propositions, expressed with almost mathematical precision. Admitting their exactness, we must also recognise that they are far from being adequate, and could not possibly afford an explanation of the different varieties of economic phenomena or help the solution of the many practical problems which the development of industry presents to the statesman. But McCulloch, Senior, Storch, Rau, Garnier,[799] and Rossi, the immediate successors of Ricardo and Say in England and France, repeated the old formulæ without making any important additions to them. The new system of political economy thus consisted of a small number of quite obvious truths, having only the remotest connection with economic life. It is true that Mill is an exception. But the Principles dates from 1848, which is subsequent to the foundation of the Historical school. With this exception we may say, in the words of Schmoller, that after the days of Adam Smith political economy seems to have suffered from an attack of anæmia.[800]

Toynbee gives admirable expression to this belief in his article on Ricardo and the Old Political Economy:[801] “A logical artifice became the accepted picture of the real world. Not that Ricardo himself, a benevolent and kind-hearted man, could have wished or supposed, had he asked himself the question, that the world of his treatise actually was the world he lived in; but he unconsciously fell into the habit of regarding laws which were those only of that society which he had created in his study for purposes of analysis as applicable to the complex society really existing around him. And the confusion was aggravated by some of his followers and intensified in ignorant popular versions of his doctrines.” In other words, there was a striking divergence between economic theory and concrete economic reality, a divergence that was becoming wider every day, as new problems arose and new classes were being formed. But the extent of the gap was best realised when an attempt was made to apply the principles of the science to countries where the economic conditions were entirely different from those existing either in England or in France.

This divergence between theory and reality might conceivably be narrowed in one of two ways. A more harmonious and a more comprehensive theory might be formulated, a task which Menger, Jevons, and Walras attempted about 1870. A still more radical suggestion was to get rid of all abstract theory altogether and to confine the science to a simple description of economic phenomena. This was the method of procedure that was attempted first, and it is the one followed by the Historical school.

Long before this time certain writers had pointed out the dangers of a too rigid adherence to abstraction. Sismondi—an essentially historical writer—treated political economy as a branch of moral science whose separation from the main trunk is only partial, and insisted upon studying economic phenomena in connection with their proper environment. He criticised the general conclusions of Ricardo and pleaded for a closer observation of facts.[802] List showed himself a still more violent critic, and, not content with the condemnation of Ricardian economics, he ventured to extend his strictures even to Smith. Taking nationality for the basis of his system, he applied the comparative method, upon which the Historical school has so often insisted,[803] to the commercial policy of the Classical school; but history was still employed merely for the purpose of illustration. Finally, socialists, especially the Saint-Simonians, whose entire system is simply one vast philosophy of history, had shown the impossibility of isolating economic from political and juridical phenomena, with which they are always intermingled.

But no author as yet had deliberately sought either in history or in the observation of contemporary facts a means of reconstructing the science as a whole. It is just here that the originality of the German school lies.

Its work is at once critical and constructive. On the critical side we have a profound and suggestive, though not always a just, analysis of the principles and methods of the older economists, while its constructive efforts gave new scope to the science, extended the range of its observations, and added to the complexity of its problems.

Generally speaking, it is not a difficult task to give an exposition of the critical ideas of the school, as we find them set forth in several books and articles, but it is by no means easy to delineate the conceptions underlying the positive work. Though implicit in all their writings, these conceptions are nowhere explicitly stated; whenever they have tried to define them it has always been, as their disciples willingly admit, in a vague and contradictory fashion.[804] To add further to the difficulty, each author defines them after his own fashion, but claims that his definition represents the ideas of the whole school.

In order to avoid useless repetitions and discussions without number we shall begin with a rapid survey of the outward development of the school, following with a résumé of its critical work, attempting, finally, to seize hold of its conception of the nature and object of political economy. From our point of view the last-named object is by far the most interesting.

I: THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL

The honour of founding the school undoubtedly belongs to Wilhelm Roscher, a Göttingen professor, who published a book entitled Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über die Staatswirtschaft nach geschichtlicher Methode in 1843. In the preface to that small volume he mentions some of the leading ideas which inspired him to undertake the work, which reached fruition in the celebrated System der Volkswirtschaft (1st ed., 1854). He makes no pretence to anything beyond a study of economic history. “Our aim,” says he, “is simply to describe what people have wished for and felt in matters economic, to describe the aims they have followed and the successes they achieved—as well as to give the reasons why such aims were chosen and such triumphs won. Such research can only be accomplished if we keep in close touch with the other sciences of national life, with legal and political history, as well as with the history of civilisation.”[805] Almost in the same breath he justifies an attack upon the Ricardian school. He recognises that he is far from thinking that his is the only or even the quickest way of attaining the truth, but thinks that it will lead into pleasant and fruitful quests, which once undertaken will never be abandoned.

What Roscher proposed to do was to try to complete the current theory by adding a study of contemporary facts and opinions, and, as a matter of fact, in the series of volumes which constitute the System, every instalment of which was received with growing appreciation by the German world of letters, Roscher was merely content to punctuate his exposition of the Classical doctrines with many an erudite excursus in the domain of economic facts and ideas.[806]

Roscher referred to his experiment as an attempt to apply the historical method which Savigny had been instrumental in introducing with such fruitful results into the study of jurisprudence.[807] But, as Karl Menger[808] has well pointed out, the similarity is only superficial. Savigny employed history in the hope of obtaining some light upon the organic nature and the spontaneous origin of existing institutions. His avowed object was to prove their legitimacy despite the radical pretensions of the Rationalist reformers of the eighteenth century. Roscher had no such aim in view. He was himself a Liberal, and fully shared in their reforming zeal. History with him served merely to illustrate theory, to supply rules for the guidance of the statesman or to foster the growth of what he called the political sense.

Schmoller thinks that Roscher’s work might justly be regarded as an attempt to connect the teaching of political economy with the “Cameralist” tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany.[809] These Cameralists were engaged in teaching the principles of administration and finance to students who were to spend their lives in administrative work of one kind or another, and they naturally took good care to keep as near actual facts as possible. Even in England and France political economy soon got involved in certain practical problems concerning taxation and commercial legislation. But in a country like Germany, which was industrially much more backward than either England or France, these problems wore a very different aspect, and some correction of the Classical doctrines was absolutely necessary if they were to bear any relation to the realities of economic life. Roscher’s innovation was the outcome of a pedagogic rather than of a purely scientific demand, and he was instrumental in reviving a university tradition rather than in creating a new scientific movement.

In 1848 another German professor, Bruno Hildebrand, put forward a much more ambitious programme, and his Die Nationalökonomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft shows a much more fundamental opposition to the Classical school. History, he thought, would not merely vitalise and perfect the science, but might even help to recreate it altogether. Hildebrand points to the success of the method when applied to the science of language. Henceforth economics was to become the science of national development.[810]

In the prospectus of the Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, founded by him in 1863, Hildebrand goes a step farther. He challenges the teaching of the Classical economists, especially on the question of national economic laws, and he even blames Roscher because he had ventured to recognise their existence.[811] He did not seem to realise that a denial of that kind involved the undoing of all economic science and the complete overthrow of those “laws of development” which he believed were henceforth to be the basis of the science.

But Hildebrand’s absolutism had no more influence than Roscher’s eclecticism, unless we make an exception of his generalisation concerning the three phases of economic development, which he differentiates as follows: the period of natural economy, that of money economy, and finally that of credit. Beyond that he merely contented himself with publishing a number of fragmentary studies on special questions of statistics or history, without, for the most part, making any attempt to modify the Classical theory of production and distribution.

The critical study of 1848 hinted at a sequel which was to embody the principles of the new method. But the sequel never appeared, and the difficult task of carrying the subject farther was entrusted to Karl Knies, another professor, who in 1853 published a bulky treatise bearing the title of Political Economy from the Historical Point of View.[812] But there is as much divergence between his views and those of his predecessors as there is between Roscher’s and Hildebrand’s. He not only questions the existence of natural laws, but even doubts whether there are any laws of development at all—a point Hildebrand never had any doubts about—and thinks that all we can say is that there are certain analogies presented by the development of different countries. Knies cannot share in the belief of either Hildebrand or Roscher, nor does he hold with the Classical school. He thinks that political economy is simply a history of ideas concerning the economic development of a nation at different periods of its growth.

Knies’s work passed almost unnoticed, ignored by historians and economists alike, until the younger Historical school called attention to his book, of which a new edition appeared in 1883. Knies makes frequent complaints of Roscher’s neglect to consider his ideas.

Such heroic professions naturally lead us to expect that Knies would spare no effort to show the superiority of the new method. But his subsequent works dealing with money and credit, upon which his real reputation rests, bear scarcely a trace of the Historical spirit.

The three founders of the science devoted a great deal of time to a criticism of the Classical method, but failed to agree as to the aim and scope of the science and left to others the task of applying their principles.

This task was attempted by the newer Historical school, which sprang up around Schmoller towards the end of 1870. This new school possesses two distinctive characteristics.

(1) The useless controversy concerning economic laws which Hildebrand and Knies had raised is abandoned. The members of the school are careful not to deny the existence of natural social laws or uniformities, and they considered that the search for these was the chief object of the science. In reality they are economic determinists. “We know now,” says Schmoller,[813] “that psychical causation is something other than mechanical, but it bears the same stamp of necessity.” What they do deny is that these laws are discoverable by Classical methods, and on this point they agree with every criticism made by their predecessors.

As to the possibility of formulating “the laws of development” upon which Hildebrand laid such stress, they professed themselves very sceptical. “We have no knowledge of the laws of history, although we sometimes speak of economic and statistical laws,”[814] writes Schmoller. “We cannot,” he regretfully says later, “even say whether the economic life of humanity possesses any element of unity or shows any traces of uniform development, or whether it is making for progress at all.”[815] This very characteristic passage from Schmoller was written in 1904,[816] and forms the conclusion of the great synthetic treatise. All attempts at a philosophy of history are treated with the same disdain.[817]

(2) The newer Historical school, not content merely with advocating the use of the Historical method, hastened to put theory into practice. Since about 1860 German economists have shown a disposition to turn away from economic theory and to devote their entire energy to practical problems, sociological studies and historical or realistic research. The number of economic monographs has increased enormously. The institutions of the Middle Ages and of antiquity, the economic doctrines of the ancients, statistics, the economic organisation of the present day, these are some of the topics discussed. Political economy is lost in the maze of realistic studies, whether of the present day or of the past.

Although the Historical school has done an enormous amount of work we must not forget that historical monographs were printed before their time, and that certain socialistic treatises, such as Marx’s Kapital, are really attempts at historical synthesis. The special merit of the school consists in the impulse it gave to systematic study of this description. The result has been a renewed interest in history and in the development of economic institutions. We cannot attempt an account of all these works and their varied contents. We must remain satisfied if we can catch the spirit of the movement. The names of Schmoller, Brentano, Held, Bücher, and Sombart are known to every student of economic history. Marshall, the greatest of modern theorists, has on more than one occasion paid them a glowing tribute.[818]

The movement soon left Germany, and it was speedily realised that conditions abroad were equally favourable for its work.

By the end of 1870 practical Liberalism had spent its force. But new problems were coming to the front, especially the labour question, which demanded immediate attention.[819] Classical economists had no solution to offer, and the new study of economic institutions, of social organisation, and of the life of the masses seemed to be the only hopeful method of gaining light upon the question. Comparison with the past was expected to lead to a better understanding of the present. The Historical method seemed to social reformers to be the one instrument of progress, and a strong desire for some practical result fostered belief in it. When we remember the prestige which German science has enjoyed since 1871, and the success of the Germans in combining historical research with the advocacy of State Socialism, we can understand the enthusiasm with which the method was greeted abroad.

Even in England, the stronghold of Ricardian economics, the influence of the school becomes quite plain after 1870.

Here, as elsewhere, a controversy as to the method employed manifests itself. Cairnes in his work The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy (1875[820]), writing quite in the spirit of the old Classical authors, strongly advocates the employment of the deductive method. In 1879 Cliffe Leslie, in his Essays on Political and Moral Philosophy, enters the lists against Cairnes and makes use of the new weapons to drive home his arguments. The use of induction rather than deduction, the constant necessity for keeping economics in living touch with other social sciences, the relative character of economic laws, and the employment of history as a means of interpreting economic phenomena, are among the arguments adopted and developed by Leslie. Toynbee, in his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution, gave utterance to similar views, but showed much greater moderation. While recognising the claims of deduction, he thought that history and observation would give new life and lend a practical interest to economics. The remoteness and unreality of the Ricardian school constituted its greatest weakness, and social reform would in his opinion greatly benefit by the introduction of new methods. Toynbee would undoubtedly have exercised tremendous influence; but his life, full of the brightest hopes, was cut short at thirty.

The lead had been given; the study of economic institutions and classes was henceforth to occupy a permanent position in English economic writings, and the remarkable works which have since been published, such as Cunningham’s Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Ashley’s Economic History, the Webbs’ Trade Unionism and Industrial Democracy, Booth’s Life and Labour of the People, bear witness to the profound influence exerted by the new ideas.

In France the success of the movement has not been quite so pronounced, although the need for it was as keenly felt there. Although it did not result in the founding of a French school of economic historians, the new current of ideas has influenced French economic thought in a thousand ways. In 1878 political economy became a recognised subject in the various curricula of the Facultés de Droit. The intimate connection between economic study and the study of law has given an entirely new significance to political economy, and the science has been entirely transformed by the infusion of the historical spirit. At the same time professional historians have become more and more interested in problems of economic history, thus bringing a spirit of healthy rivalry into the study of economic institutions. Several Liberal economists also, without breaking with the Classical tradition, have devoted their energies to the close observation of contemporary facts or to historical research.[821]

Finally, we have a new group of workers in the sociologists. Sociology is interested in the origin and growth of social institutions of all kinds and in the influence which they have exerted upon one another. After studying institutions of a religious, legal, political, or social character it is only natural that they should ask that the study of economic institutions should be carried on in the same spirit and with the help of the same method. This object has been enthusiastically pursued for some time. The mechanism and the organisation of the economic system at different periods have been closely examined by the aid of observation and history. Abstraction has been laid aside and a preference shown for minute observation, and for induction rather than deduction.[822]

II: THE CRITICAL IDEAS OF THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL

Among so many writers whose works cover such a long period of time we can hardly expect to find absolute unanimity, and we have already had occasion to note some of the more important divergencies between them, especially those separating the newer from the older writers of the Historical school. We cannot here enter into a full discussion of all these various shades of opinion, and we must be content to mention the more important features upon which they are almost entirely at one, noticing some of the principal individual doctrines by the way.

The German Historical school made its début with a criticism of Classical economics, and we cannot better begin than with a study of its critical ideas.[823]

Although these ideas had already found expression in the writings of Knies, Hildebrand, and Roscher, there was nothing like the discussion which was provoked by them when the newer Historical school, at a much later period, again brought them to public notice. The publication of Karl Menger’s work, Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften, in 1883—a classic both in style and matter—ushered in a new era of active polemics. This remarkable work, in which the author undertakes the defence of pure political economy against the attacks of the German Historical school, was received with some amount of ill-feeling by the members of that school,[824] and it caused a general searching of hearts during the next few years. We must try to bring out the essential elements in the discussion, and contrast the arguments advanced by the Historians with the replies offered by their critics.

Broadly speaking, three charges are levelled at the Classical writers. (i) It is pointed out that their belief in the universality of their doctrines is not easily justified. (ii) Their psychology is said to be too crude, based as it is simply upon egoism. (iii) Their use, or rather abuse, of the deductive method is said to be wholly unjustifiable. We will review these charges seriatim.

The Historians held that the greatest sin committed by Smith and his followers was the inordinate stress which they laid upon the universality of their doctrines. Hildebrand applies the term “universalism” to this feature of their teaching, while Knies refers to it as “absolutism” or “perpetualism.” The belief of the Anglo-French school, according to their version of it, was that the economic laws which they had formulated were operative everywhere and at all times, and that the system of political economy founded upon them was universal in its application. The Historians, on the other hand, maintained that these laws, so far from being categorically imperative, should be regarded always as being subject to change in both theory and practice.

First with regard to practice. A uniform code of economic legislation cannot be indifferently applied to all countries at all epochs of their history. An attempt must be made to adapt it to the varied conditions of time and place. The statesman’s art consists in adapting principles to meet new demands and in inventing solutions for new problems. But, as Menger points out, this obvious principle, which was by no means a new one, would have met with the approval of Smith and Say, and even of Ricardo himself;[825] although they occasionally forgot it, perhaps, especially when judging the institutions of the past or when advocating the universal adoption of laissez-faire.

The second idea, namely, that economic theory and economic laws have only a relative value, is treated with even greater emphasis, and this was another point on which the older economists had gone wrong. Economic laws, unlike the laws of physics and chemistry, with which the Classical writers were never tired of comparing them, have neither the universality nor the inevitability of the latter. Knies has laid special stress on this point. “The conditions of economic life determine the form and character of economic theory. Both the process of argument employed and the results arrived at are products of historical development. The arguments are based upon the facts of concrete economic life and the results bear all the marks of historical solutions. The generalisations of economics are simply historical explanations and progressive manifestations of truth. Each step is a generalisation of the truth as it is known at that particular stage of development. No single formula and no collection of such formulæ can ever claim to be final.”[826]

This paragraph, though somewhat obscure and diffuse, as is often the case with Knies, expresses a sound idea which other economists have stated somewhat differently, by saying that economic laws are at once provisional and conditional. They are provisional in the sense that the progress of history continually gives rise to new facts of which existing theories do not take sufficient account. Hence the economist finds himself obliged to modify the formulæ with which he has hitherto been quite content. They are conditional in the sense that economic laws are only true so long as other circumstances do not hinder their action. The slightest change in the conditions as ordinarily given might cancel the usual result. Those economists who thought of their theory as a kind of final revelation, or considered that their predictions were absolutely certain, needed reminding of this.

But Knies is hopelessly wrong in thinking that this relativity is enough to separate the laws of economics from the laws of other sciences. Professor Marshall justly remarks that chemical and physical laws likewise undergo transformation whenever new facts render the old formulæ inadequate. All these laws are provisional. They are also hypothetical in the sense that they are true only in the absence of any disturbing cause. Scientists no longer consider these laws as inherent in matter. They are the product of man’s thought and they advance with the development of his intelligence.[827] They are nothing more or less than formulæ which conveniently express the relation of dependence that exists between different phenomena; and between these various laws as they are framed by the human mind there is no difference except a greater or lesser degree of proof which supports them.

What gives to the laws of physics or chemistry that larger amount of fixity and that greater degree of certainty which render them altogether superior to economic law as at present formulated is a greater uniformity in the conditions that give rise to them, and the fact that their action is often measurable in accordance with mathematical principles.[828]

Not only has Knies exaggerated the importance of his doctrine of relativity,[829] but the imputation that his predecessors had failed to realise the need for it was hardly deserved. We shall have to refer to this matter again. Mill’s Principles was already published, and even in the Logic, which appeared for the first time in 1843, and several editions of which had been issued before 1853, the year when Knies writes, we meet with the following sentence:[830] “The motive that suggests the separation of this portion of the social phenomenon from the rest … is that they do mainly depend at least in the first resort on one class of circumstances only; and that even when other circumstances interfere, the ascertainment of the effect due to the one class of circumstances alone is a sufficiently intricate and difficult business to make it expedient to perform it once for all and then allow for the effect of the modifying circumstances.” Consequently sociology, of which political economy is simply a branch, is a science of tendencies and not of positive conclusions. No better expression of the principle of relativity could ever be given.

Notwithstanding all this, modern economists have come to the conclusion that the criticisms of the Historical school are sufficiently well founded to justify them in demanding greater precision so as to avoid those mistakes in the future. Dr. Marshall, for one, adopts Mill’s expression, and defines an economic law as “a statement of economic tendencies.”[831]

Even the founders of pure political economy, although their method is obviously very different from that of the Historians, have taken similar precautions. They expressly declare that the conclusions of the science are based upon a certain number of preliminary hypotheses deliberately chosen, and that the said conclusions are only provisionally true. “Pure economics,” says Walras, “has to borrow its notion of exchange, of demand and supply, of capital and revenue, from actual life, and out of those conceptions it has to build the ideal or abstract type upon which the economist exercises his reasoning powers.”[832] Pure economics studies the effects of competition, not under the imperfect conditions of an actual market, but as it would operate in a hypothetical market where each individual, knowing his own interests, would be able to pursue them quite freely, and in full publicity. The conception of a limited area within which competition is fully operative enables us to study as through a magnifying-glass the results of a hypothesis that really very seldom operates in the economic life of to-day.

We may dispute the advantages of such a method, but we cannot say that the economists ever wished to deny the relativity of a conclusion arrived at in this fashion.

While willing to admit that the Historians have managed to put this characteristic in a clear light just when some economists were in danger of forgetting it, and that it is a universally accepted doctrine to-day, we cannot accept Knies’s contention that it affords a sufficient basis for the distinction between natural and economic laws. And such is the opinion of a large number, if not of the majority, of economists.[833]

The second charge is levelled against the narrowness and insufficiency of the psychology. Adam Smith treated man as a being solely dominated by considerations of self-interest and completely absorbed in the pursuit of gain. But, as the Historians justly point out, personal interest is far from being the sole motive, even in the economic world. The motives here, as elsewhere, are extremely varied: vanity, the desire for glory, pleasure afforded by the work itself, the sense of duty, pity, benevolence, love of kin, or simply custom.[834] To say that man is always and irremediably actuated by purely selfish motives, says Knies, is to deny the existence of any better motive or to regard man as a being having a number of centres of psychical activity, each operating independently of the other.[835]

We cannot deny that the Classical writers believed that “personal interest”—not in the sense of egoism, which is the name given it by Knies, and which somewhat distorts their view—held the key to the significance and origin of economic life. But the claims of the Historians are again immoderate. Being themselves chiefly concerned with concrete reality in all its complexity of being, and with all its distinctive and special features rather than its general import, they forgot that the primary aim of political economy is to study economic phenomena en masse. The Classical economists studied the crowd, not the individual. If we neglect the differences that occasionally arise in special cases, and allow for the personal equation, do we not find that the most constant motive to action is just this personal desire for well-being and profit? This is the opinion of Wagner, who on this question of method is not quite in agreement with other members of the school. In his suggestive study of the different motives that influence economic conduct he definitely states that the only motive that is really constant and permanent in its action is this self-interest. “This consideration,” he says, “does something to explain and to justify the conduct of those writers who took this as the starting-point of their study of economics.”[836]

But having admitted this, we must also recognise, not that they denied the changes occasionally undergone by self-interest under the pressure of other motives, as Knies suggests, but that they have neglected to take sufficient account of such modifications. Sometimes it really seems as if they would “transform political economy into a mere natural history of egoism,” as Hildebrand says.

We can only repeat the remark which we have already made, namely, that when this criticism was offered it was scarcely justified. Stuart Mill had drawn attention to this point in his Logic ten years previously.[837] “An English political economist, like his countrymen in general, has seldom learned that it is possible that men in conducting the business of selling their goods over the counter should care more about their ease or their vanity than about their pecuniary gain.” For his own part he ventures to say that “there is perhaps no action of a man’s life in which he is neither under the immediate nor under the remote influence of any impulse but the mere desire of wealth.”[838]

It is evident that Mill did not think that self-interest was the one unchangeable and universal human motive. Much less “egoism,” for, as we have seen in the previous chapter, his “egoism” includes a considerable admixture of altruism.

But here again the strictures of the Historians, though somewhat exaggerated, have forced economists of other schools to be more precise in their statements. The economists of to-day, as Marshall remarks, are concerned “with man as he is; not with an abstract or ‘economic’ man, but a man of flesh and blood.”[839] And if the economist, as Marshall points out, pays special attention to the desire for gain among the other motives which influence human beings, this is not because he is anxious to reduce the science to a mere “natural history of egoism,” but because in this world of ours money is the one convenient means of measuring human motive on a large scale.[840] Even the Hedonists, whose economics rest upon a calculus of pleasure and pain, are careful to note that their hypothesis is just a useful simplification of concrete reality, and that such simplification is absolutely necessary in order to carry the analysis of economic phenomena as far as possible. It is an abstraction—imposed by necessity, which is its sole justification, but an abstraction nevertheless.

It is just here that the final reproach comes in, namely, the charge of abusing the employment of abstraction and deduction, and greater stress is laid upon this count than upon either of the other two.

Instead of deduction the new school would substitute induction based upon observation.

Their criticism of the deductive method is closely connected with their attack upon the psychology of the older school. The Classical economists thought, so the Historians tell us, that all economic laws could be deduced by a simple process of reasoning from one fundamental principle. If we consider the multiplicity of motives actually operative in the economic world, the insufficiency of this doctrine becomes immediately apparent. The result is not a faithful picture, but a caricature of reality. Only by patient observation and careful induction can we hope to build up an economic theory that shall take full account of the complexity of economic phenomena. “There is a new future before political economy,” writes Schmoller in 1883, in reply to a letter of Menger, “thanks to the use that will be made of the historical matter, both descriptive and statistical, that is slowly accumulating. It will not come by further distillation of the abstract propositions of the old dogmatism that have already been distilled a hundred times.”[841]

The younger school especially has insisted on this; and Menger has ventured to say that in the opinion of the newer Historical school “the art of abstract thinking, even when distinguished by profundity and originality of the highest order, and when based upon a foundation of wide experience—in a word, the exercise of that gift which has in other sciences resulted in winning the highest honour for the thinkers—seems to be of quite secondary importance, if not absolutely worthless, as compared with some elaborate compilation or other.”[842]

But the criticism of the Historical school confuses two things, namely, the particular use which the Classical writers have made of the abstract deductive method, and the method itself.

No one will deny that the Classical writers often started with insufficient premises. Even when the premises were correct, they were too ready to think and not careful enough to prove that their conclusions were always borne out by the facts. No one can defend their incomplete analysis, their hasty generalisations, or their ambiguous formulæ.[843]

But this is very different from denying the legitimacy of abstraction and deduction. To isolate a whole class of motives with a view to a separate examination of their effects is not to deny either the presence or the action of other motives, any more than a study of the effect of gravitation upon a solid involves the denial of the action of other forces upon it. In a science like political economy, where experiment is practically impossible, abstraction and analysis afford the only means of escape from those other influences which complicate the problems so much. Even if the motives chosen were of secondary importance, the procedure would be quite legitimate, although the result would not be of any great moment. But it is of the greatest service and value when the motive chosen is one, like the search for gain or the desire for personal satisfaction, which exercises a preponderant influence upon economic action.[844]

So natural, we may even say so indispensable, is abstraction, if we are to help the mind steer its way amid the complexity of economic phenomena, that the criticism of the Historical school has done nothing to hinder the remarkable development which has resulted from the use of the abstract method during the last thirty years. But, although the Neo-Classical school has succeeded in replacing the old methods in their position of honour once more, it no longer employs those methods in the way the older writers did. A more solid foundation has been given them in a more exact analysis of the needs which personal interest ought to satisfy.[845] And the mechanism of deduction itself has been perfected by a more rigid use of the ordinary logical forms, and by the adoption of mathematical phraseology.

Happily the controversy as to the merits of the rival methods, which was first raised by the Historical school, has no very great interest at the present moment. Most eminent economists consider that both are equally necessary. There seems to be a general agreement among writers of different schools to consider the question of method of secondary importance, and to forget the futile controversies from which the science has gained so little. Before concluding this section it may be worth while to quote the opinion of men who represent very different tendencies, but are entirely agreed with regard to this one subject. “Discussion of method,” says Pareto, “is a pure waste of time. The aim of the science is to discover economic uniformities, and it is always right to follow any path or to pursue any method that is likely to lead to that end.”[846] “For this and other reasons,” says Marshall, “there always has been, and there probably always will be, a need for the existence side by side of workers with different aptitudes and different aims.… All the devices for the discovery of the relations between cause and effect which are described in treatises on scientific method have to be used in their turn by the economist.”[847]

These writers generally employ the abstract method. Let us now hear some of the Historians. Schmoller is the author of that oft-quoted phrase, “Induction and deduction are both necessary for the science, just as the right and left foot are needed for walking.”[848]

More remarkable still, perhaps, is the opinion of Bücher, an author to whom the Historical school is indebted for some of its most valuable contributions. “It is therefore a matter of great satisfaction that, after a period of diligent collection of material, the economic problems of modern commerce have in recent times been zealously taken up again and that an attempt is being made to correct and develop the old system in the same way in which it arose, with the aid, however, of a much larger store of facts. For the only method of investigation which will enable us to approach the complex causes of commercial phenomena is that of abstract isolation and logical deduction. The sole inductive process that can likewise be considered—namely, the statistical—is not sufficiently exact and penetrating for most of the problems that have to be handled here, and can be employed only to supplement or control.”[849]

III: THE POSITIVE IDEAS OF THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL

What made the criticism of the Historians so penetrating was the fact that they held an entirely different view concerning the scope and aim of economics. Behind the criticism lurked the counter-theory. Nothing less than a complete transformation of the science would have satisfied the founders, but the younger school soon discovered that so ambitious a scheme could never be carried out. It is important that we should know something of the view of those older writers on this question, and the way they had intended to give effect to their plans. The positive contribution made by the Historical school to economic study is even more important than its criticisms, for it gives a clue to an entirely different point of view with which we are continually coming into contact in our study of economic doctrines.

The study of economic phenomena may be approached from two opposite standpoints, which we may designate the mechanical and the organic. The one is the vantage-ground of those thinkers who love generalisations, and who seek to reduce the complexity of the economic world to the compass of a few formulæ; the other of those writers who are attracted by the constant change which concrete reality presents.

The earlier economists for the most part belonged to the former class. Amid all the wealth and variety of economic phenomena they confined their attention almost entirely to those aspects that could be explained on simple mechanical principles. Such were the problems of price fluctuations, the rate of interest, wages, and rent. Production adapting itself to meet variation in demand, with no guide save personal interest, looked for all the world like the intermolecular action of free human beings in competition with one another. The simplicity of the idea was not without a certain grandeur of its own.

But such a conception of economic life is an extremely limited one. A whole mass of economic phenomena of the highest importance and of the greatest interest is left entirely outside. The phenomena of the economic world, as a matter of fact, are extremely varied and changeable. There are institutions and organisations without number, banks and exchanges, associations of masters and unions of men, commercial leagues and co-operative societies. Eternal struggle between the small tradesman and the big manufacturer, between the merchant and the combine, between the peasant proprietor and the great landowner, between classes and individuals, between public and private interests, between town and country, is the common feature of economic life. A state rises to prosperity again to fall to ruin. Competition at one moment makes it superior, at another reduces its lead. A country changes its commercial policy at one period to reintroduce the old régime at another. Economic life fulfils its purposes by employing different organs that are continually modified to meet changing conditions, and are gradually transformed as science progresses and manners and beliefs are revolutionised.

Of all this the mechanical conception tells us nothing. It makes no attempt to explain the economic differences which separate nations and differentiate epochs. Its theory of wages tells us nothing about the different classes of workpeople, or of their well-being during successive periods of history, or about the legal and political conditions upon which that well-being depends. Its theory of interest tells us nothing of the various forms under which interest has appeared at different times, or of the gradual evolution of money, whether metallic or paper. Its theory of profits ignores the changes which industry has undergone, its concentration and expansion, its individualistic nature at one moment, its collective trend at another. No attempt is made to distinguish between profits in industry or commerce and profits in agriculture. The Classical economists were simply in search of those universal and permanent phenomena amid which the homo œconomicus most readily betrayed his character.

The mechanical view is evidently inadequate if we wish to delineate concrete economic life in all its manifold activity. We are simply given certain general results, which afford no clue to the concrete and special character of economic phenomena.

The weakness of the mechanical conception arises out of the fact that it isolates man’s economic activity, but neglects his environment. The economic action of man must influence his surroundings. The character of such action and the effects which follow from it differ according to the physical and social, the political and religious surroundings wherein they are operative. A country’s geographical situation, its natural resources, the scientific and artistic training of its inhabitants, their moral and intellectual character, and even their system of government, must determine the nature of its economic institutions, and the degree of well-being or prosperity enjoyed by its inhabitants. Wealth is produced, distributed, and exchanged in some fashion or other in every stage of social development, but each human society forms a separate organic unit, in which these functions are carried out in a particular way, giving, accordingly, to that society a distinctive character entirely its own. If we want to understand all the different aspects of this life we must make a study of its economic activity, not as it were in vacuo, but in connection with the medium through which it finds expression, and which alone can help us to understand its true nature.[850]

This was the first doctrine on which they laid stress: the other follows immediately. This social environment cannot be regarded as fixed. It is constantly undergoing some change. It is in process of transformation and of evolution. At no two successive moments of its existence is it quite the same. Each successive stage calls for explanation, which history alone can give. Goethe has given utterance to this thought in a memorable phrase which serves as a kind of epigraph to Schmoller’s great work, the Grundriss. “A person who has no knowledge of the three thousand years of history which have gone by must remain content to dwell in obscurity, living a hand-to-mouth existence.” We must have some knowledge of the previous stages of economic development if we are to understand the economic life of the present. Just as naturalists and geologists in their anxiety to understand the present have invented hypotheses to explain the evolution of the globe and of living matter upon it, so must the student of economics return to the distant past if he wants to get hold of the industrial life of to-day. “Man as a social being,” says Hildebrand, “is the child of civilisation and a product of history. His wants, his intellectual outlook, his relation to material objects, and his connection with other human beings have not always been the same. Geography influences them, history modifies them, while the progress of education may entirely transform them.”[851]

The Historians maintained that the earlier economists by paying exclusive attention to those broader conclusions which had something of the generality of physical laws about them had kept the science within too narrow limits. Alongside of theory as they had conceived of it—some Historians would say instead of it—there is room for another study more closely akin to biology, namely, a detailed description and a historical explanation of the constitution of the economic life of each nation. Such is the positive contribution of the school to the study of political economy, and it fairly represents the attitude of the present-day Historians towards the older economists.

Their aim was a perfectly natural and legitimate one, and at first sight, at least, seemed very attractive. But beneath its apparent simplicity there is some amount of obscurity, and its adversaries have thought that upon close analysis it is really open to serious objections.

In the first place, is it the aim of the science to present us with an exact, realistic picture of society, as the Historians loved to think? On the contrary, do we not find that a study can only aspire to the name of a science in proportion as its propositions become more general in their nature? There is no science without generalisation, according to Aristotle, and concrete description, however indispensable, is only a first step in the constitution of a science. A science must be explanatory rather than descriptive.

Of course Historians are not always content with mere description. Some Historians have attempted explanation and have employed history as their organon. Is the choice a suitable one?

“History,” says Marshall, “tells of sequences and coincidences; but reason alone can interpret and draw lessons from them.”[852]

Moreover, is there a single important historical event whose cause has ceased to be a matter of discussion? It will be a long time before people cease to dispute about the causes of the Reformation or the Revolution, and the relative importance of economic, political, and moral influences in determining the course of those movements has yet to be assigned. The causes that led to the substitution of credit for money or money for barter are equally obscure. Before narrative can become science there must be the preliminary discovery by a number of other sciences of the many diverse laws whose combination gives rise to concrete phenomena.[853] Not history but the sciences give the true explanation. The evolutionary theory has proved fruitful in natural history simply because it took the succession of animal species as an established fact and then discovered that heredity and selection afforded a means of explaining that succession. But history cannot give us any hypothesis that can rival the theory of evolution either in its scientific value or in its simplicity. In other words, history itself is in need of explanation. It gives no clue to reality and it can never take the place of economics.[854]

The earlier Historians claimed a higher mission still for the historical study of political economy. It must not only afford an explanation of concrete economic reality, but it must also formulate the laws of economic development. This idea is only held by a few of them, and even the few are not agreed as to how it should be done. Knies, for example, thinks that it ought to be sufficiently general to include the economic development of all nations. Saint-Simon held somewhat similar views. Others, and among them Roscher, hold that there exist parallelisms in the history of various nations; in other words, that every nation in the course of its economic development passes through certain similar phases or stages. These similarities constitute the laws of economics. If we were to study their movements in the civilisations of the past we might be able to estimate their place in existing societies.[855]

Neither point seems very clear. Even if we admit that there is only one general law of human development we cannot forecast the line of progress, because scientific prediction is only applicable to recurrent phenomena. They fail just when the conditions are new. Of course one can always guess at the nature of the future, but divination is not knowledge. And predictions of this kind are almost always false.[856] Historical parallelism rests on equally shaky foundations. A nation, like any other living organism, passes through the successive stages of youth, maturity, and old age, but we are not justified in thinking that the successive phases through which one nation has passed must be a kind of prototype to which all others must conform. All that we can say is that in two neighbouring countries the same effects are likely to follow from the same causes. Production on a large scale, for example, has been accompanied by similar phenomena in most countries in Western Europe. But this is by no means an inevitable law. It is simply a case of similar effects resulting from similar causes. Such analogies are hardly worthy of the name of laws. The discovery of the law, as Wagner says,[857] may be a task beyond human power; and Schmoller, as we have already seen, is of the same opinion.

One remark before concluding. There is a striking similarity between the ideas just outlined and those of a distinguished philosopher whose name deserves mention here, although his influence upon political economy was practically nil. We refer to Auguste Comte.

It is curious that the earliest representatives of the school should have ignored him altogether, but just as Mill remained unknown to them, so the Cours de Philosophie positive, though published in 1842, remained a sealed book so far as they were concerned. Comte’s ideas are so very much like those of Knies and Hildebrand that some Positivist economists, such as Ingram and Hector Denis, have attempted to connect the Historical tendency in political economy with the Positive philosophy of Comte.[858]

The three fundamental conceptions which formed the basis of the teaching of the Historical school are clearly formulated by Comte. The first is the importance of studying economic phenomena in connection with other social facts. The analysis of the industrial or economic life of society can never be carried on in the “positive” spirit by simply making an abstraction of its intellectual, political, or moral life, whether of the past or of the present.[859] The second is the employment of history as the organon of social science. “Social research,” says he, “must be based upon a sane analysis of the all-round development of the best of mankind up to the present moment, and the growing predilection for historical study in our time augurs well for the regeneration of political economy.” He was fully persuaded that the method would foster scientific prediction—a feature which is bound to fuse all those diverse conditions which will form the basis of Positive politics.

Comte wished to found sociology, of which political economy was to be simply a branch. The Historical school, and especially Knies, regarded economics in the same spirit. Hence the analogies with which Knies had to content himself, but which the younger school refused to recognise. But there was a fundamental difference between their respective points of view, and this will help us to distinguish between them.

Comte was a believer in inevitable natural laws, which, according to the earlier Historians, had wrought such havoc. The Historical method also, as he conceived of it, was something very different from what the older or the newer Historical school took it to be.

Adopting a dictum of Saint-Simon, Comte speaks of the Historical method as an attempt to establish in ascending or descending series the curve of each social institution, and to deduce from its general outlines conclusions as to its probable growth or decline in the future. This is how he himself defines the process: “The essence of this so-called historical spirit, it seems to us, consists in the rational use of what may be called the social series method, or, in other words, in the due appreciation of the successive stages of human development as reflected in a succession of historical facts. Careful study of such facts, whether physical, intellectual, moral, or political, reveals a continuous growth on the one hand and an equally continuous decline on the other. Hence there results the possibility of scientific prophecy concerning the final ascendancy of the former and the complete overthrow of the latter, provided always such conclusion is in conformity with the general laws of human development, the sociological preponderance of which must never be lost sight of.”[860] It was in virtue of this method that Saint-Simon predicted the coming of industrialism and that Comte prophesied the triumph of the positive spirit over the metaphysical and religious.

There is considerable difference between this attitude and the Historical method as we know it,[861] and the attempt at affiliation seems to us altogether unwarranted. But the coincidence between Comte’s views and those of Knies and Hildebrand is none the less remarkable, and it affords a further proof of the existence of that general feeling which prompted certain writers towards the middle of the century to attempt a regeneration of political economy by setting it free from the tyranny of those general laws which had nearly stifled its life.

It seems to us, however, that the Historical school is mistaken if it imagines that history alone can afford an explanation of the present or will ever enable us to discover those special laws which determine the evolution of nations.

On the other hand, it has a perfect right to demand a place beside economic science, and it is undoubtedly destined to occupy a position still more prominent in the study of economic institutions, in statistical investigation, and above all in economic history. Not only is a detailed description of the concrete life of the present of absorbing interest in itself, but it is the condition precedent to all speculations concerning the future. The theorist can never afford to neglect the minute observation of facts unless he wills that his structure shall hang in the void. Most abstract economists feel no hesitation in recognising this. For example, Jevons, writing in 1879,[862] gave it as his opinion that “in any case there must arise a science of the development of economic forces and relations.”

This newer historical conception came to the rescue just when the science was about to give up the ghost, and though they may have failed to give us that synthetic reconstruction which is, after all, within the ability of very few writers, its advocates have succeeded in infusing new life into the study and in stimulating new interest in political economy by bringing it again into touch with contemporary life. They have done this by throwing new light upon the past and by giving us a detailed account of the more interesting and more complex phenomena of the present time.[863] Such work must necessarily be of a fragmentary character. The school has collected a wonderful amount of first-class material, but it has not yet erected that palace of harmonious proportions to which we in our fond imagination had likened the science of the future. Nor has it discovered the clue which can help it to find its way through the chaos of economic life. This is not much to be wondered at when we remember the shortcomings of the method to which we have already had occasion to refer. Indeed, some of the writers of the school seem fully convinced of this. Professor Ashley, in an article contributed to the Economic Journal, employs the following words:[864] “As I have already observed, the criticisms of the Historical school have not led so far to the creation of a new political economy on historical lines: even in Germany it is only within very recent years that some of the larger outlines of such an economics have begun to loom up before us in the great treatise of Gustav Schmoller.”

In view of considerations like these one might have expected that the Historical school would have shown greater indulgence to the attempts made both by the Classical and by the Hedonistic schools to give by a different method expression to the same instinctive desire to simplify matters in order to understand them better.[865]