The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation, and Other Essays by Thorstein Veblen

Author:Thorstein Veblen [Veblen, Thorstein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781465528629
Google: 1ZF_aCNCwxgC
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
Published: 1932-01-15T02:40:32+00:00

It has seemed necessary to offer this much in characterisation of that "historical" aim and method which afforded a point of departure for Professor Schmoller's work of revision. When he first raised his protest against the prevailing ideals and methods, as being ill-advised and not thorough-going, he does not seem himself to have been entirely free from this Romantic, or Hegelian, bias. There is evidence to the contrary in his early writings.[5] It cannot even be said that his later theoretical work does not show something of the same animus, as, e.g., when he assumes that there is a meliorative trend in the course of cultural events.[6] What has differentiated his work from that of the group of writers which has above been called the elder line of historical economics is the weakness or relative absence of this bias in his theoretical work. Particularly, he has refused to bring his researches in the field of theory definitely to rest on ground given by the Hegelian, or Romantic, school of thought. He was from the first unwilling to accept classificatory statements of uniformity or of normality as an adequate answer to questions of scientific theory. He does not commonly deny the truth or the importance of the empirical generalisations aimed at by the early historical economists. Indeed, he makes much of them and has been notoriously urgent for a full survey of historical data and a painstaking digestion of materials with a view to a comprehensive work of empirical generalisation. As is well known, in his earlier work of criticism and methodological controversy he was led to contend that for at least one generation economists must be content to spend their energies on descriptive work of this kind; and he thereby earned the reputation of aiming to reduce economics to a descriptive knowledge of details and to confine its method to the Baconian ground of generalisation by simple enumeration. But this exhaustive historical scrutiny and description of detail has always, in Professor Schmoller's view, been preliminary to an eventual theory of economic life. The survey of details and the empirical generalisations reached by its help are useful for the scientific purpose only as they serve the end of an eventual formulation of the laws of causation that work out in the process of economic life. The ulterior question, to which all else is subsidiary, is a question of the causes at work rather than a question of the historical uniformities observable in the sequence of phenomena. The scrutiny of historical details serves this end by defining the scope and character of the several factors causally at work in the growth of culture, and, what is of more immediate consequence, as they are at work in the shaping of the economic activities and the economic aims of men engaged in this unfolding cultural process as it lies before the investigator in the existing situation.

In the preliminary work, then, of defining and characterising the causes or factors of economic life, historical investigation plays

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