tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 42

History of Economic Analysis part 42. 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 372 best to protect Still more important they did so in a spirit of laissez-faire that is to say on the theory that the best way of promoting economic development and general welfare is to remove fetters from the private-enterprise economy and to leave it alone. This is what will be meant in this book by Economic Liberalism. The reader is requested to keep this definition in mind because the term has acquired a different in fact almost the opposite meaning since about 1900 and especially since about 1930 as a supreme if unintended compliment the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label. By Political Liberalism which must be distinguished from economic liberalism as our footnote amply shows we mean sponsorship of parliamentary government freedom to vote and extension of the right to vote freedom of the press divorce of secular from spiritual government trial by jury and so on including retrenchment and pacific though not necessarily pacifist foreign policy. This was the program3 of the first phase of the French Revolution. A tendency to carry it out eventually asserted itself everywhere. But the rates of speed differed widely as between different countries and so did the combinations of forces and circumstances that were responsible for each step. The rate at which the business class itself was converted to political liberalism also differed widely and not only as between different countries but also as between different subgroups of the bourgeoisie. Not even economic liberalism was welcomed everywhere and by the whole business class political liberalism came to large sectors of it like an undesired child. The adherents of the Spanish Constitution of 1811 who were the first to call themselves liberales had not the whole bourgeoisie behind them. Neither had the French libéraux of the 1820 s. It was a wing only which was but semirecognized and received also nonbusiness support from .