Historical Economics and Cultural History

Abstract

Abstract The disciplines on which this book primarily concentrates—anthropology, Völkerpsychologie, and human geography—re all clearly cultural sciences as that term has been used here. That is, in all three disciplines, the dominant theoretical patterns throughout the nineteenth century focused mainly on the culture concept and featured the traditional nomothetic aim of liberal social science extended by a heightened emphasis on empirical research. Two other disciplines closely linked in origin and theoretical orientation with these cultural sciences were historical economics and cultural history. In some senses, they can be regarded as cultural sciences themselves in that the culture concept had a central place in both. Both encompassed nomothetic approaches to understanding, although the nomothetic aim came to be seriously questioned in each-more so than in anthropology or human geography. Both disciplines became involved in the methodological disputes that were central to the revolution in German social science at the tum of the century. The cultural sciences on which we have concentrated thus far remained at the periphery of those debates. This chapter will briefly examine historical economics and cultural history as cultural sciences. It will focus on their connections to the other cultural sciences and the extent to which their most important theoretical patterns developed in response to common factors that influenced all of the cultural disciplines. Because of the methodological struggles in which historical economists and cultural historians engaged, the chapter also presents an opportunity to consider links between nomothetic cultural science and other major tendencies in social studies.