THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMICS CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION The Genetic Viewpoint.-There is a history for nearly everything because life is more than an arithmetical proposition. If our experience consisted merely of an adding or subtracting of magnitudes perfectly definite and comparable, it might have the merit of simplicity, but few would like its monotonous course. What gives spice to life is variety, and one principal test of variety is the difficulty we find in trying to equate things. When many kinds of elements must be correlated, when interaction is more than a parallelogram of forces as mechanics knows it, then events take place which are the very essence of History. History deals with processes in time, or perhaps is time itself, because it consists of changes by which, in the last analysis, time becomes measurable. Each individual makes his own history, since his experiences are largely of different sorts and cannot be put together like the components of a sum. We associate history with larger groups only, because we ascribe to them an immortality which is not really theirs. For the members of any group, however mighty, die in due time; what survives is a set of relations with which we have, consciously or unconsciously, identified that group. Consequently the history of a nation offers interesting material for study, each of us seeing a part of his self reflected in the personality of the whole. Yet, whether we write autobiography or universal history, the fundamental fact is always that of change. The older we grow, the greater the fund of facts for a narrative, the more noticeable the transiency of things, thoughts, structures and functions. Nothing proves to be quite permanent. All items are subject to revision and destruction. Relative values alone can be established, except that the notion at least of an absolute must exist if its opposite is to become logical. Both science and common sense have turned increasingly during the last century to this aspect of relativism. Not autocracy but democracy, i. e., rights and duties properly related to common ends, not universalism but the territorial origin of laws and ideals, not transcendental realities that experience will never prove, but knowledge born of the senses and variable with person, time, and place; not isolation for self-sufficient individuals, but interrelations which make each one an integral part of a larger whole-such are the modern contrasts that make clear the issue of absolutism versus relativism. The question is not whether ideals may exist or pictures be imagined that reach beyond the world of sense, but whether, so far as the past has shown, our constructs are imperishable, our standards eternally the same, our applications successful according to plans. And here the answer is as unequivocal as it is easy: the whole history of thought testifies to the relativity of our understanding. Nothing is quite certain. Nothing holds good for more than a time. The truths that have been recog nized from the beginning of civilization and cherished ever since as axiomatic are few indeed. In relations with our fellowmen certain needs and reactions may be said to prove the constancy of human nature; but even here our records are incomplete. The historical standpoint therefore is natural enough. It must always puzzle the student of science that the relativity in time and space of all human values was so late in being built into a comprehensive theorem. Where change is so universal and persistent, how could men fail to grasp the principle while noting the facts? The Orientals and the Greeks of course had known both in a general way, but a definite formulation with conclusions to guide us in our quest for truth did not come until very recently. The historical viewpoint is now only a species within the genus Genetics. The genetic outlook comprises the sum total of changes about us, while the historian devotes himself particularly to the elucidation of human activities and judgments. What is true of the cosmos is proven to be doubly applicable to man, namely, that change is a rule without exceptions. Change as motion and interaction in the physical and chemical world. Change as metabolism, growth, and decay. Changes of habits and opinions, manners and wishes and needs. Changes of which only the scientist can become convinced, because they take place so slowly that the senses will not perceive them. Changes in flora and fauna, of earth and the cosmos, and of man whose records more especially interest us. Everywhere the same law. A becoming, waxing, and waning. A series of stages more or less. open to inspection. Continuity amid variations. Different rates of change, and overlappings as between different fields of action, but always a binding link, a correlation traceable after due inquiry, a possibility of explaining how and when and where the modifications affected the object in question, our beliefs and customs, our sciences and religions, our modes of living and public policies. The genetic principle proves equally fruitful whether we study creed or deed, things or thoughts, politics or economics. History, then, has value even though we deny its application to ethics. The lesson may not be one to guide our future conduct or to suggest formula which science by itself cannot frame. But nevertheless there are advantages in sight. For whether history is written simply to tell how things really happened, as Leopold von Ranke said, or whether we hope from the beginning to shed light on the present by scanning the records of the past, the benefit remains the same. Information is ours in both cases. The use to which we put it is no concern of the historian, though, to be sure, it is a foregone conclusion that a valuation of some sort has occurred. For, in the words of the poet: "My friend, the times gone by are but in sum What spirit of the times you call Good Sirs is but your spirit after all In which the times are seen reflected." It is practically impossible to speak of the past without putting into it something of the present. Retrospects necessarily are partly prospective. As we look forward or around us, we behold times gone by, whose life becomes intelligible only as, at one point or another, it connects with our own. Historians consequently dare not hope to be mere assemblers of facts, even if they wished to. The fact itself is little or nothing, the interpretation much or everything. The value put upon events of the } past is the core of historiography. By consulting human nature we are enabled to reconstruct the motives and materials of an earlier epoch, but though this reasoning from analogy will always be at the bottom of historical research, the externals of life vary sufficiently to influence us to-day when we rehearse the happenings of yesterday. The present arose out of the past, which may help to explain the former. To judge rightly on the faults or merits of existing institutions we must follow them back to their sources and intermediate stations. All this harmonizes with our modern habit of prefacing a critique of what is with a review of how it came into being. But we are at the same time to remember the pragmatic nature of historical research, the limited value of any attempt to portray faithfully a situation no longer before us. The Economic Interpretation of History.-The founders of socialism helped to set us aright in this matter by their blunt assertion that history becomes explicable in the light of economic conditions. They overlooked or disparaged the power of existing thoughts and prejudices, and magnified the force of external circumstances. They said: Yes, you can find out just exactly what people were and did and wanted and believed at any given period, but you must first study the economy of that period.) A real world existed then as now. Your knowledge of it may be pretty definite, and true to things as they actually were. It is not a question of being under the sway of your personal notions or of your Zeitgeist, but of being willing to look for solutions where alone they reside, in the modes of production and exchange of goods. Whatever the laws or the philosophies or the religions or the customs of the time, be sure to connect them with the economic background, and do it so that the causal relation runs consistently from the latter to the former. |