Page 16 - DLIS407_INFORMATION AND LITERATURE SURVEY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Unit 2: Historical Development of Economics and Political Science Disciplines

The given below is the contribution made by prominent authors in the field of economics and political Notes
science.

2.1 Contribution Made by Prominent Authors in Development of
Economics

The relation of political economy or since Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890) simply ‘economics’ to
history and political science is complicated. Political economy had been taught as part of the curriculum
in ‘moral philosophy’ in America’s schools. Its teachers had included Francis Wayland, a Baptist
minister and later president of Brown, Henry Carey, a business man with extensive Pennsylvania
mining and manufacturing interests, and clerics, Francis Bowen, John Bascom and Arthur Latham
Perry, to name but a few. In the 1870’s, this tradition, representing a melding of laissez-faire British
economy and Puritanism, had a firm grip on the posts in political economy in the older college
curriculum in America (O’Connor, 1944; Dorfman, 1949). Although this is usually not much noticed,
the problem in America was that the new doctors returning from Germany had deeply imbibed
German historical economics.
It was by no means guaranteed that in challenging the older tradition, the German brand would lose
out. It was not merely that these men had the authority of their decrees, but that they were reformers
in a period when reform was very much in the air. The theoretical issue was joined when in 1884
Richard Ely published ‘Past and Present Political Economy,’ in Adams’ Johns Hopkins University Studies
in History and Political Science (Furner, 1975: 60). There was nothing surprising about what he said.
The ‘old’ political economy was deductivist, hypothetical, abstract; it glorified the baser emotions and
selfishness and made it seem that competition was divinely ordained. The ‘new’ political economy,
anchored in concrete history, had a firm grip on reality and it could show how the state could be
used to advance the interests of people in society. Ely’s attack earned a response. It came from Simon
Newcombe, author of Principles of Political Economy (1885), also a professional on the Hopkins faculty,
but not all that surprisingly, a mathematician and an astronomer. Newcombe confidently and ably
defended the apriorism of British political economy, and while Schumpeter (1984: 866) asserts that his
book is ‘the outstanding performance of American general economics in the pre-Clark-Fisher-Taussig
epoch,’ he did it, unsurprisingly, without any of the qualifications or restrictions which I.S. Mill’s
evidently ignored ‘Unsettled Questions’ had tried to make clear.
Mill, it may be remembered, defended political economy as an ‘essentially abstract science’; but he
went on to argue that its conclusions, ‘like those of geometry, are only true, as the common phrase is,
in the abstract’ (Mill, 1974: 144). Accordingly, ‘it does not treat the whole of man’s nature as modified
by the social state, nor of the whole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a
being who desires to possess wealth’ (1974: 137) just as Ely had charged. Mill had concluded that
the problem for practice was how to go from ‘abstract truths’ to the ‘facts of the concrete, clothed in
all the complexity with which nature has surrounded them’ (1974: 148). That Mill did not settle the
‘unsettled questions,’ of course, is exactly why there was a Methodenstreit in Germany, why Durkheim
rose to challenge French political economy, and why, in America, Ely and Newcombe were at war.
The critics shared in believing that the real world did not answer to the abstractions of the classical
school and thus that they could not be used to grasp concrete social life.
Nearly coincident with the opening shots, Edmund I. James and Simon N. Patten had begun planning
for an organization, modeled on Schmnoller’s Verein fiir Sozialpolitik. It would combat the widespread
view that our economic problems would solve themselves, and that our laws and institutions which
at present favor industrial instead of collective action can promote the best utilization of our material
resources and secure to each individual the highest development of all his faculties. (Quoted from
Dorfman, 1949, Vol. 3: 205)

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