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History of Economic Analysis part 16

History of Economic Analysis part 16. 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 112 a The Protestant or Laical Scholastics. Though separated from the scholastics by the religious split and by the change in the political scene they were of the same professional type as the scholastics and they went about the same task by the same method in much the same spirit so much so in fact that the best way of characterizing them is to call them Protestant or laical scholastics. They would not of course have agreed with this diagnosis. Nor is the characterization likely to appeal to modern students of either Catholic or Protestant or liberal sympathies. They all emphasize the differences in religious and political beliefs or doctrines and from their standpoints are quite right in seeing contrast where we see similarity. It cannot be too often repeated that in this book we are concerned only with the methods and results of analysis and that everything else comes in only so far as it sheds light on them. And these methods and results do not differ substantially from those of the late scholastics. This does not mean that the philosophers of natural law copied the scholastics without saying so. Though in many cases scholastic influence is clear beyond reasonable doubt there presumably was also rediscovery or development from the same sources the Roman jurists in particular. The current of thought that the philosophers sponsored was much too important to leave any educated person untouched. Moreover as will become clear presently they were but a link in a sequence that runs far into the nineteenth century. For both reasons it is impossible to speak of them as a definitely delimited group. Just now we shall exclude not only all those authors whom it is usual to appraise as mere economists but also all those contributions that do not bear any relation to the philosophy of natural law even though the men who wrote them belonged to the group. On this understanding it will suffice to mention a very few representative seventeenth-century