English Political Economy

Abstract

or mechanistic sciences deal. Wisdom requires also a balanced view of the concrete diversities of life. So far as this important element in wisdom can be gained or imparted, it must largely be through historical studies. History, in the broadest sense, is concerned with precisely those concrete differences, those special appurtenances of place or time, which the general and abstract view mostly has to ignore. History has its own way of explaining why particular events have occurred or why particular institutions have emerged or survived, and its way is not the way of the abstract sciences. History explains the present in terms of its specific relations to the past, and in so doing it reinterprets the past in terms of the interests and problems of the present. Its quality (except in certain special fields where it deals with numbers, and thus becomes statistics) is aesthetic, rather than (in any rigorous sense) scientific. But that does not mean that historical interpretation is merely a matter of taste, that there is no discoverable difference between the history which illuminates and the history which misleads, any more than it means that there is no difference between the literature which reveals life and the literature which falsifies it or conceals it under a conventional gloss. History leads to new appraisals of our economic order, and to a realisation of the variety and mutability of the institutional patterns which direct our energies into one path rather than another, and which thus establish the general framework within which, at any given time, the economic life of society proceeds. The old question of the relative importance of the work of the economic theorist and the work of the economic historian is one of those questions which ought not to be asked. Each makes his contribution to our understanding of economic life, but the two contributions are altogether unlike, so that one supplements the other. The adherents of the older historical schools, in the criticisms which they directed against English political economy, were right in whatever stress they put upon the importance of historical studies. But they failed to see the practical value, the compelling necessity even, of inquiries into the mechanism of economic life, and some of them, at least, missed the real value of historical studies while attributing to such studies certain formal scientific virtues which generally they do not have. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.153 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 04:44:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms I928] ENGLISH POLITICAL ECONOMY I3 English political economy of the orthodox line has never concerned itself rnuch with history in any formal way. Individual writers differ, but taking something like an average of the six or eight great nineteenth-century treatises, I should say that English political economy has not been altogether unhistorical in its outlook or its general temper-at any rate not unhistorical in the degree that either the more abstract mathematical systems of political economy or the doctrinaire philosophies of history that have been proffered as substitutes for such economic theory are unhistorical. Such use as English political economy has made of history has been unsystematic and casual. But historical elements are woven, almost indistinguishably, into its general contexture. It is the presence of these concrete elements, along with the special character of some of its problems and the peculiarly British lineage of some of its general conceptions, which makes one of Cournot's penetrating observations especially applicable to English political economy. The science of the economists, he said, more than other sciences, without being, as has been wrongly said, a literature, is permeated by that flavour of the soil, marked by that stamp of time and place which distinguishes one literature from another. . . Other sciences also have their history, their growth, which is linked to the progress of society, but not in such degree that their physiognomy reflects, like a literature, the physiognomy of society.' Just as a country's literature is its own national heritage, imperfectly communicable across the barriers set up by differences in history and language, so, I suspect, some of the controversies of the various schools of economic theory are not much nore than a confusion of tongues. It is scarcely to be supposed that one looking back a hundred years from to-day at the development of economic science in the twentieth century would be able to say that it had kept closely to the general pattern set by the English political economy of the nineteenth century. Some of the findings that once were thought important have already been re'ected on the ground that they were mistaken or misleading. Others have been forgotten, because they had lost whatever significance they once had. There remains a substantial body of other findings, however, which appear to us to-day to be both true and important, and which, so far as our limited vision goes, will be permanent elements in economic science. But what the economist of to-day inherits from that older 1 Revue sommaire des doctrines dconomiques, pp. 336, 337.1,