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History of Economic Analysis part 44

History of Economic Analysis part 44. 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 392 As explained above the Cours presents two aspects which must be carefully distinguished. First it expounds the doctrine that all our knowledge is knowledge of invariant relations between given phenomena on whose nature or causation there is no sense in speculating. This positivism brought earlier tendencies to a head and anticipated in some respects the much more interesting empiriocriticism of the next period. It is a philo-sophical doctrine in the technical sense of the term though a negative one and as such did not exert and was incapable of exerting any influence upon research in any particular science. But second Comte s primary concern was not really with this philosophy. The Cours starts with the question how in an epoch of inevitable specialization we might salvage that organic unity of all human knowledge that was so vital a reality in the times of the polyhistors. His answer was that we should create for this purpose another specialty the specialty of généralités. This plan has meaning quite independently of whatever philosophic opinions one might entertain and comes to the fore again later on. The Cours is an attempt to carry this plan into effect in a particular way and with a particular slant. Comte s particular way was this he tried to arrange the total of all scientific knowledge knowledge from other than scientific sources he did not recognize into a hierarchy of sciences or to change the simile into a building every floor of which was to be occupied by a different science and which was to rise from foundations in logic and mathematics toward the problems of human society. The six floors were respectively assigned to Mathematics Astronomy Physics Chemistry Biology and Psychology being conspicuous by its absence Sociology the science of society. And he actually proceeded if I may keep to the analogy to furnish every floor with what he conceived to be those elements in every science that were most important for the .