In introduction to his history of Sweden, Svenskt arbete och liv (1941, trans. 1963), Eli Heckscher noted that economic history expects its to be both theorist and empiricist. This is a challenge for which human mind appears none too well equipped. So it would seem. Yet it is challenge of a fully scientific economics. A fully scientific economics would aspire to condition of historical economics after Fogel and North. Economics has always wavered between blackboard and archive. Since Hobbes in his middle age discovered geometry, the onely Science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow upon mankind, some economists have believed that great social truths could be extracted from blackboard. A parallel belief, first expressed by political arithmeticians of seventeenth century, has denied blackboard in favor of Just Facts, Ma'am. It is econometrics, German historical school, and American history before Robert Fogel and Douglass North. as Heckscher put it, adept at historical economics had better do Another precursor of modern historical economics, English historian T. S. Ashton (1974) expressed it this way: But whole discussion as to whether deduction or induction is proper method to use in social sciences is, of course, juvenile; it as though we were to debate whether it were better to hop on right foot or on left. Sensible men endowed with two feet know that they are likely to make better progress if they walk on both. By walking on two feet, Fogel and North created historical economics in United States. The European precursors included Heckscher and Schumpeter, Brinley Thomas and Alexander Gerschenkron, among others a thin, bright stream that became a river in American Midwest. Until 1950s writers on American history were dominated by institutionalism of a German sort, spurning neoclassical economics of a British, Austrian, and Swedish sort. Fogel and North, together with groups at Purdue, Toronto, Harvard, and Yale, brought two conversations back together.
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Dec 1, 2019
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