tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 10

History of Economic Analysis part 10. 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 52 Republic2 is no more analysis than a painter s rendering of a Venus is scientific anatomy. It goes without saying that on this plane the contrast between what is and what ought to be loses its meaning. The artistic quality of the Politeia and of the whole literature mostly lost of which the Politeia seems to have been the peak achievement is well brought out by the German term for it Staatsromane literally state novels . In default of a satisfactory English synonym we must use the word Utopia. The reader presumably knows that more or less under the influence of the Platonic example this type of literature again found favor in the Renaissance and then continued to be produced sporadically to the end of the nineteenth But analysis comes in after all. There is a relation between the painter s Venus and the facts described by scientific anatomy. Just as Plato s idea of horseness obviously has something to do with the properties of observable horses so his idea of the Perfect State is correlated with the material furnished by the observation of actual states. And there is no reason whatever to deny the analytic or scientific character remember we do not attach any complimentary meaning to either of these words of such observations of facts or relations between facts as are enshrined explicitly or by implication in Plato s construction. Reasoning of an analytic nature is still more prominent in a later work the Nomoi Laws . But nowhere is it pursued as an end in itself. Consequently it does not go very far. Plato s Perfect State was a City-State conceived for a small and so far as possible constant number of citizens. As stationary as its population was to be its wealth. All economic and non-economic activity was strictly regulated warriors farmers artisans and so on being organized in permanent castes men and women being treated exactly alike. Government was entrusted to one of these castes the caste of guardians or rulers who .