[808] Untersuchungen über die Methode der Sozialwissenschaften und der Politischen Oekonomie insbesondere. (Leipzig, 1883.)
[809] Schmoller, loc. cit. For further information concerning the Cameralists see Geschichte der Nationalökonomie, by M. Oncken. Menger and Schmoller also connect Roscher with Heeren, Gervinus, and the other historians of Göttingen who during the first quarter of the nineteenth century tried to found a science of politics upon a general study of history. Roscher had studied history under them, and his aim is in every respect similar to theirs.
[810] In the introduction, p. v, he declares that the object of his work is “to open a way for an essentially historical standpoint in political economy and to transform the science of political economy into a body of doctrines dealing with the economic development of nations.”
[811] Even Roscher had ventured to say that they partook of a mathematical nature. This is how he expresses his views as against those of Hildebrand on the real aim of political economy in the Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, vol. i, p. 145: “Economic science need not attempt to find the unchangeable, identical laws amid the multiplicity of economic phenomena. Its task is to show how humanity has progressed despite all the transformations of economic life, and how this economic life has contributed to the perfection of mankind. Its task is to follow the economic evolution of nations as well as of humanity as a whole, and to discover the bases of the present economic civilisation as well as of the problems that now await solution.”
[812] The exact title of the first edition was Die Politische Oekonomie vom Standpunkte der geschichtlichen Methode. A second edition appeared in 1883 with a slightly different title. Our quotations are taken from the second edition.
[813] Schmoller, Grundriss der Volkswirtschaftslehre, vol. i, p. 107 (1904).
[814] Ibid., vol. i, p. 108.
[815] Ibid., vol. ii, p. 653.
[816] All historians, however, are not equally sceptical. Ashley in his preface to English Economic History and Theory writes as follows: “Just as the history of society, in spite of apparent retrogressions, reveals an orderly development, so there has been an orderly development in the history of what men have thought, and therefore in what they have thought concerning the economic side of life.” And Ingram, in his History of Political Economy, points out that “As we have more than once indicated, an essential part of the idea of life is that of development—in other words, of ordered change. And that such a development takes place in the constitution and working of society in all its elements is a fact which cannot be doubted.… That there exist between the several social elements such relations as make the change of one element involve or determine the change of another is equally plain; and why the name of natural laws should be denied to such constant relations of coexistence and succession it is not easy to see. These laws being universal admit of the construction of an abstract theory of economic development.” (P. 205.)
[817] Schmoller thinks that the science in the present stage of development, while it cannot be prevented from attempting a philosophy of history, is much better employed in building up simple scientific hypotheses with a view to gauging the future course of development than in getting hold of “absolute truths.”