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History of Economic Analysis part 11

History of Economic Analysis part 11. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | History of economic analysis 62 for explanatory analysis. There is nothing surprising or blameworthy in this. It is by slow degrees that the physical and social facts of the empirical universe enter the range of the analytic searchlight. In the beginnings of scientific analysis the mass of the phenomena is left undisturbed in the compound of common-sense knowledge and only chips of this mass arouse scientific curiosity and thereupon become problems. For Aristotle interest was no such chip. He accepted the empirical fact of interest on money loans and saw no problem in it. He did not even classify loans according to the various purposes they are capable of serving and does not seem to have noticed that a loan that financed consumption is something very different from a loan that financed maritime trade foenus nauticum . He condemned interest which he equated to usury in all cases on the ground that there was no justification for money a mere medium of exchange to increase in going from hand to hand which of course it does not do . But he never asked the question why interest was being paid all the same.9 This question was first asked by the scholastic doctors. It is to them that the credit belongs of having been the first both to collect facts about interest and to develop the outlines of a theory of it. Aristotle himself had no theory of interest. In particular he should not be hailed as the forerunner of the monetary interest theories of today. For though he linked up interest with money this was not due to analytic effort but to the absence of it analysis that eventually leads back to a preanalytic view that earlier analysis seemed to have disproved imparts a different meaning to it. 6. GREEK PHILOSOPHY So far as economics in the technical sense is concerned we do not lose anything by leaving Greek thought at this point. Unfortunately we lose a lot in another respect. There is hardly an idea in the realm of philosophy that does not descend from Greek sources and