tailieunhanh - History of Economic Analysis part 45

History of Economic Analysis part 45. 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 402 the emphasis upon the original document was quite general. It constitutes the main scholarly merit of Michelet. We find it also in writers whom we do not value primarily as scholars for example Thiers the politician. We find it even in the creators of the realistic novel for example the brothers Goncourt. In the second place historians developed a bent for sociological analysis that benefited from its proximity to facts. Niebuhr s attention to institutions and to the question of the effects of policies and reforms and Thierry s attention to racial factors may serve as examples. This hardly ever amounted to explicit theorizing but it very often implied sociological theories though needless to say they were none the better for not being properly articulated. Moreover much more than before we observe interest in economic phenomena per se. This interest manifested itself even where we should least expect it in the field of ancient history 14 on the one hand and in the pictorial history of the period on the other. Lord Macaulay s History of England 1848-61 illustrates to perfection what I mean by pictorial history history that concentrates on the picturesque military or political events and narrates them with an eye to stirring effect. But Macaulay has chapters descriptive of economic and social conditions that are indeed effective pictures but entirely different ones. An analogous statement holds for History of the French Revolution 1st French ed. 1823-7 English trans. 1838 . In the third place there was a literature important by virtue of achievement but still more important as the basis of later developments that may be described as the product of the purely scientific wing of the historical school of jurisprudence or as the product of the institutionalist wing of the historians. I shall illustrate this by the names of four eminent men whose lines of research widely though they differed from one another all come within the