tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 19

History of Economic Analysis part 19. 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 142 as much the consequence of habit-forming conditions as it was a causal factor in subsequent developments. Nevertheless we shall for convenience go on speaking of the National State. b Why the National States Were Aggressive. It must be left to the reader to develop the implications of all this. But it should be clear that it was the persistence of aristocratic rule the access of ideally disposable wealth and the breakdown of the supernational power of the Middle Ages rather than anything derivable from the capitalist process itself that explain not only the emergence but also the political physiognomy of the modern state. In particular those facts explain why the modern state was national from the first and refractory to any supernational consideration why it insisted and was compelled to insist on absolute sovereignty why it fostered national churches even in Catholic countries as instanced by Gallicanism in France and above all why it was so aggressive. The new sovereign powers were warlike by virtue of their social structures. They had emerged in a haphazard way. None of them had all it wanted each of them had what others wanted. And they were soon surrounded by new worlds inviting competitive conquest. Because both of this situation and the social structure of the epoch aggression or what is the same thing defense became the pivot of policy. In this fermenting world peace was but armistice war the normal remedy for political disequilibrium the foreigner ipso facto the enemy as he had been in primitive times. All this made for strong governments and strong governments chronically suffering from political ambitions that went beyond their economic means were driven to increasingly successful attempts to make themselves still stronger by developing the resources of their territories and harnessing them into their service. This in turn explains among other things why taxation assumed not only a much greater but a new significance see