Principles of Political Economy, Vol. 1

by Wilhelm Roscher

The nineteenth century affords us something more than the admirable spectacle of the rapid and fertile development of mechanical power and natural forces. This is but one of the aspects, we might even say but one of the results, of the general progress of the human mind. The renovation of moral and intellectual studies has served as a starting point for the application to facts of the conquests of thought. Science has preceded art.

In the foremost rank of the studies just referred to is philosophy, which initiates us into the knowledge of human nature, the basis of right, and which translates its legitimate aspirations into a language which we can understand; history, that prophetess of the truth, as one of the ancients called it, which places before us the faithful picture of times past, not by simply putting together a skeleton of facts, but by following the living progress of events and the organic development of institutions. Such, at least, has been the work of those noble minds who have consecrated their energies to the resuscitation of ages past, in their true shape, and such is the service for which we are indebted to them for the successful accomplishment of the reformation of historical studies, which they attempted with such rare devotion and such marvelous sagacity.

This renovation of history has exerted the most fertile influence in the region of philosophy, in that of law, and we believe that it will prove no less useful in that of Political Economy. It has served to put us on our guard against being easily misled by a priori notions.

By exhibiting to us the results of the life and of the experience of centuries, by teaching us by what steps the human mind has risen to its present eminence, and what the education given it in the past has been, it has enabled us to ascend from phenomena to the principles which preside over them; from facts to the law; and it has substituted for arbitrary assumptions and purely ideal systems, the slow but progressive work of the genius of nations. Not that it turns a deaf ear to the exalted lessons of philosophy, nor that it denies the eternal relations resulting from the nature of things. Far from it. On the contrary, it supplies a solid basis to intellectual investigations, and, so to speak, an answer for all the moral sciences, to this saying of Rœderer: “Politics is a field which has been traversed thus far only in a balloon; it is time to put foot on solid ground.”

Neither does history, as thus understood, confine itself to mere description; it also assumes the office of judge. While it pulls down much that passion and inaccuracy have reared, and thus restores respect for the past, it does not turn that past into a fetish. It looks it boldly in the face and questions it, instead of prostrating itself before it and worshipping it with downcast eyes. Thus, by plainly showing us the many bonds which tie us to it, it escapes at once both the rashness of impatience and the wearisomeness of routine.

The impartiality it inculcates is not indifference; and there is no danger that the justice it metes out to past ages shall degenerate into a vain scepticism or a convenient optimism.

The study of history, thus understood, has another advantage; it accustoms us to those patient and disinterested investigations, to those lengthy labors, the positive result of which at first escapes us for a time, only to burst on our eyes, with so much more brilliancy, when rigorous research has succeeded in discovering it. It frees us from the deadly constraint of immediate utility.

There is nothing more fatal to science than the feverish impatience for results which obtains only too much in our own [pg 004] days, and which induces people to run after him who is in the greatest hurry, and which leads to hasty conclusions.

“Research undertaken from a disinterested love of science,” says the learned Hugo, one of the masters of the historical school of law in Germany,[5] “that research which at first promises no other advantage but truth and the culture of the mind, is precisely that which brings us the richest rewards. Would we not be behind, in all the sciences, if we had clung only to those principles, the utility of which in practice was already known? Do we not, to-day, from many a discovery, reap advantages of which its author never dreamed?”

Doubtless this tendency, unless restrained by other demands, is not exempt from danger. We may be carried away by the attraction peculiar to these noble studies, withdraw into antiquity and fall into a species of historical mysticism which ends in the affirmation, that whatever has been is true, absolutely, and which, instead of confining itself to the explanation of transitory phenomena, invests them with all the dignity of principles. We shall endeavor to avoid the peril pointed out by Mallebranche. “Learned men study rather to acquire a chimerical greatness in the imagination of other men, than to acquire greater breadth and strength of mind themselves. They make their heads a kind of store-room, into which they gather, without order or discrimination, everything which has a look of erudition,—I mean to say everything which may seem rare or extraordinary and excite the wonder of other people. They glory in getting together, in this archæological museum, antiques with nothing that is rich or solid about them, and the price of which depends on nothing but fancy, chance or passion.”