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.”