History of Economic Analysis part 16 doc

(a) The Protestant or Laical Scholastics. Though separated from the scholastics by the religious split and by the change in the political scene, they were of the same professional type as the scholastics and they went about the same task, by the same method, in much the same spirit—so much so, in fact, that the best way of characterizing them is to call them Protestant (or laical) scholastics. They would not, of course, have agreed with this diagnosis. Nor is the characterization likely to appeal to modern students of either Catholic or Protestant or ‘liberal’ sympathies. They all emphasize the differences in religious and political beliefs or doctrines and, from their standpoints, are quite right in seeing contrast where we see similarity. It cannot be too often repeated that in this book we are concerned only with the methods and results of analysis and that everything else comes in only so far as it sheds light on them. And these methods and results do not differ substantially from those of the late scholastics. This does not mean that the philosophers of natural law copied the scholastics without saying so. Though in many cases scholastic influence is clear beyond reasonable doubt, there presumably was also rediscovery or development from the same sources—the Roman jurists in particular. The current of thought that the philosophers sponsored was much too important to leave any educated person untouched. Moreover, as will become clear presently, they were but a link in a sequence that runs far into the nineteenth century. For both reasons it is impossible to speak of them as a definitely delimited group. Just now we shall exclude not only all those authors whom it is usual to appraise as mere economists but also all those contributions that do not bear any relation to the philosophy of natural law, even though the men who wrote them belonged to the group. On this understanding, it will suffice to mention a very few representative seventeenth-century names: Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf. Hugo Grotius or Huigh de Groot (1583–1645, De jure belli ac pacis, 1st ed., 1625; 2nd rev. ed., 1631) was first and last a great jurist whose fame rests upon his outstanding performance in international law. He dealt but briefly with economic subjects, such as prices, monopolies, money, interest, and usury in Book II, ch. 12—very sensibly no doubt but without adding anything of note to the teaching of the late scholastics. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679; besides the Leviathan (1651), De cive (1642) and De corpore politico (1650) should be mentioned; Sir Leslie Stephen’s biography may be recommended as one of the best sketches of the cultural backgrounds of that time) was an Oxford man of the private-tutor type and, first and last, a political sociologist. He was not more interested in economics than was Grotius, though he also touched upon economic subjects, especially money. His importance for us is due not so much to the powerful originality of his political philosophy (which really fits in better with the subject of the next chapter) but rather to the fact that, more than any other philosopher of natural law, he was open to the incipient mechanistic materialism of his time and that he transmitted its influence, particularly through his ethical and psychological (sensationalist) teaching, to the social sciences. It is relevant to note that though he was not a good, let alone creative, mathematician and physicist, he took a more than dilettantic interest in both these fields; and that all this did not prevent him from making several excursions into speculative theology besides using theological arguments and biblical quotations within his sociological analysis. History of economic analysis 112 John Locke, the philosopher (1632–1704; a first and incomplete collection of his works appeared in 1714, a nine-volume one in 1853; there are many lives), was also a product of Oxford. He started his career by tutoring and lecturing and then entered the civil service, in which, under the wings of Whig protectors (whom he furnished with advice and ideologies), he eventually rose to a seat in the Board of Trade. His work is of first-rate importance for us on a number of counts. First, as a philosopher in the narrow sense of the word, he led the empiricist tendency to victory first in England and then on the Continent, especially in France, as against Cartesian rationalism (the decisive work was his Essay concerning Human Understanding, publ. 1690). This was indeed a break with the scholastic tradition (Aristotle) and a quite decisive one. The reader should reflect, however, that this does not imply that there was a similar break in political or economic theory: it is essential to keep these things distinct. Second, as an advocate of (qualified) tolerance, of the liberty of the press, and of extended education, Locke was instrumental in building up the general scheme of later political liberalism, which fact must be mentioned in passing because of its relation to economic liberalism. Third, as a political theorist (see especially his Two Treatises of Government, publ. 1690) Locke may claim a front-rank place among the philosophers of natural law, though he added little to Grotius and Pufendorf. Fourth, as an economist (see below, ch. 6) he made significant contributions which will, however, be dealt with in another connection because they stand in no relation to either his philosophy or his political theory. Finally, we must again note his theological interests (see especially his Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695). Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–94) was a jurist of the academic type and successively professor at the Universities of Heidelberg, Lund (Sweden), and Berlin. He was not much more than a follower of Grotius. But he wrote a treatise that became a textbook of international reputation and sums up and represents the whole structure of the social science of the philosophers of natural law much better than do the works of the greater men mentioned before: De jure naturae et gentium, libri octo (1st ed. [the one used], 1672); more important than his earlier Elementa jurisprudentiae universalis (1660). It is the work to consult to get a general idea of the range and level of that type of social science. Moreover, Pufendorf went much further into economics than did Grotius (Book V, chs. 1–8), though he still does not seem to me to have added much to the stock of knowledge and to the analytic apparatus of the late scholastics. But he presented the material in a systematic form. Characteristically enough, he also wrote a theological tract: De habitu christianae religionis ad vitam civilem. Other names might be mentioned, among them some the reader is likely to miss. But the great name of Leibniz and that of his faithful henchman, Christian Wolff, are left out advisedly: they were polyhistors, of course, and greatly interested, among other things, in the economic events and policies of their day; but they made no contribution to our subject. However, perhaps I should have mentioned Thomasius (1655–1728) because his writings shed interesting light on the concept of natural law as used by the group. Exactly like the scholastics, the philosophers of natural law aimed at a comprehensive social science—a comprehensive theory of society in all its aspects and activities—in which economics was neither a very important nor an independent element. This social science of the philosophers first appeared in the form of systems of jurisprudence that were similar to the scholastic treatises De justitia et jure: Grotius and Pufendorf were The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 113 primarily lawyers and their treatises are primarily treatises on law. They dealt with legal and political principles for which very general validity was claimed on the ground that they were natural in the sense that they derived from general properties of human nature and not, like positive law, from the particular conditions of individual countries. 2 And all the rest of what has been said in the preceding section about the methodological character and the various meanings of natural law of the late scholastics, particularly on the relation between its normative and its analytic aspect, would now have to be repeated for the natural law of the laical philosophers. But though it is grossly inaccurate either to ascribe to the latter the conception itself and its exploitation for purely analytic purposes, or to style them as innovators who rose against scholastic methods of thought, there are several contributions of theirs to record, some of them more felicitous than others. (b) Mathematics and Physics. The philosophers of natural law lived in the heroic age of mathematics and physics. Spectacular discoveries in what for the general public—though not for us—was the ‘new experimental philosophy’ were attended by no less spectacular popularity of physics, even with mere men of letters and great ladies. First in Italy, then everywhere else, experimenters and mathematicians gathered in order to discuss results and fight out differences; but their meetings drew the curious who wished to have things explained and were welcomed because of the assistance they were able to render financially and otherwise. 3 Those successes and this fashion were not lost upon the philosophers of natural law. They—or some of them—looked at their tools and wondered whether they did not after all bear some similarity 2 Hobbes, Leviathan, I, chs. 14 and 15, enumerated 19 such principles which he called natural laws. The ‘science’ of these laws he called Moral Philosophy, a term that will presently be introduced in a different sense. 3 For our purpose, it will suffice to mention the example of the English Royal Society, chartered, after having existed informally for about twenty years, in 1662—King Charles II took a dilettantic but intelligent interest in it. For a century to come, it was precisely such a gathering of professional physicists and interested laymen. Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was president from 1703 to his death and published his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687) under its auspices. Its organ, the Philosophical Transactions, began to appear shortly after the granting of the charter. The term Natural Philosophy was used to denote what we call the physical (as distinguished from social) sciences until the first decades of the nineteenth century. This use of the word ‘natural’ further contributed to confusion. It was, I believe, the curiosity awakened by the achievements of the physical sciences which, spreading beyond its original habitat, created a demand for a type of work that was substantially new, the encyclopaedia. The first achievements in this field were Pierre Bayle’s (1647–1706) Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697)—the forerunner of the much more comprehensive work of the encyclopédistes of the eighteenth century whom we shall mention later on—and John Harris’ Lexicon technicum (1704). History of economic analysis 114 to those of the victorious physicists; Pufendorf professed to use a methodus mathematica, though actually he did not do so. Hobbes declared that ‘civil philosophy’—a term clearly used for the sake of the parallelism to natural philosophy in the sense of physical science—dated from the publication of his own book, De cive (1642), and that he was the first to apply to this civil philosophy the methods of Copernicus and Galileo (which he, however, conceived of as deduction from an abstract and universal ‘law of motion’). This sort of thing, mere talk though it was, had a most unfortunate consequence. We have seen that later critics, mainly those in sympathy with the historical school, attacked the natural-law concept on the ground that it was metaphysical and speculative. Other nineteenth-century writers who took that talk at its face value, as critics are apt to do, condemned it as too ‘naturalist,’ that is to say, as implying an attempt to copy physical methods of analysis. It even happened that the same critic raised both objections, which, in addition to being unfounded, are mutually exclusive. So the unfortunate concept of natural law eventually met disaster under fire from two opposite quarters. Or rather, the phrase did; for the idea lived on. It cannot even be asserted that the laical philosophers were less theology-minded than the late scholastics, though theirs was, of course, a different theology. They wrote books on theological questions. They quoted scripture in support of their arguments. The fourth Part of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) is entitled ‘Of the Kingdom of Darknesse’ and contains a chapter on Daemonology, though the demons are no doubt reduced to a symbolic existence as are angels in the third Part. (c) Economic and Political Sociology. Into this conception of human nature the philosophers of natural law introduced elements which, though not entirely new, received an emphasis that was. The more important of these are due to Hobbes. The scholastic doctors had implied that private property owes its origin, in part, to the necessity of avoiding a chaotic struggle for goods, and government its origin to the necessity of enforcing peace and order. But they did not go as far as to speak of an original war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes) or of every man’s being a wolf to every other man (homo homini lupus). This sort of thing did not become general doctrine and can hardly be called an analytic improvement. Similarly, the social contract, more delicately adumbrated by the doctors and by Grotius, came out with brutal naïveté in Hobbes’s system. In the Leviathan (II, chs. 17 and 18) he lets a commonwealth or civitas, ‘that great Leviathan,’ actually be generated by an agreement or covenant, which everyone enters into with everyone else for the purpose of transferring each one’s right to govern himself to a man or an assembly of men. This doctrine, restated in its baldest as well as most influential form by Locke, did command almost general assent. But the omnipotence with which Hobbes invested this government did not; Locke in particular was in no mind to argue that the subjects cannot change the form of government, and that the power of the government cannot be forfeited. In any case, the thesis of governmental omnipotence has no analytic standing. For it is not, like some of the juridical arguments of the doctors and the philosophers, the cloak of an analytic proposition, but just a juridical argument and nothing else; Hobbes simply deduced it from the imaginary covenant by arbitrarily inter-preting it in such a way as to The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 115 imply unconditional surrender of the citizen. Finally, we may note that Locke ‘justified’ private property from everyone’s right to his own person, which includes the right to one’s labor, which includes the right to the results of one’s labor—again a purely juridical argument and an obviously inadequate one at that. It hardly needs to be added that this argument has nothing whatever to do with a labor theory of value. If this were all, then the contribution of the philosophers to political and economic sociology would be indeed a poor one. But there is something else, namely, a contribution to what we may call Metasociology or Philosophical Anthropology: some of the philosophers probed into that human nature from which their natural laws were to be derived. 4 Again, Hobbes is the outstanding example. The first Part of the Leviathan, entitled ‘Of Man,’ which leads up to the natural-law concept, blocks out a whole philosophy of the human mind and deals with the psychology and social psychology of thought, imagination, speech, religion, and the like. Much of this has Aristotelian and scholastic roots, though Hobbes adopted the all but general practice of indicating antagonism where there was development. But, in a definite direction, he actually went much further than either Aristotle or the scholastics had gone. He defined ‘thought’—an individual thought, the same thing as Locke’s ‘idea’—as the ‘representation of an external object’ and let the human mind be furnished by sense impression. It may indeed be asserted that he anticipated the substance of Locke’s empiricism as well as the principle of associationist psychology that was to become so closely allied to economics in the times of the two Mills, father and son (see below, Part III, ch. 3, sec. 5). By Philosophical Empiricism we mean the doctrine, adumbrated by the Greeks (Aristotle, Epicureans, Stoics) but developed mainly by English thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (especially by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume), that (a) all knowledge of the individual is derived through experience during his own life; (b) that this experience may be equated to the sense impressions to which his mind is exposed; (c) that prior to this experience his mind is not only a complete blank but even without ‘conative’ activity of its own and also without innate ideas in the sense of categories by which the sense impressions are marshalled—so that it would perhaps be logical to say that, as such, ‘mind’ does not exist at all; (d) that the impressions are the ultimate elements into which all mental phenomena may be resolved, not only remembrance, attention, reasoning—including the construction of causal sequences—but also the affective ones, the ‘passions’: all these are but 4 Metasociology, then, denotes investigations into human nature or human behavior or, more generally, into the wide realm of all the facts that, though relevant for sociology, do not belong to it in a professional sense but lie beyond or behind it, such as investigations into the formation of habits or into the properties of physical environments. Analogously, we may speak of Metaeconomics. The term Philosophical Anthropology denotes the same thing as Metasociology, the adjective distinguishing it from Anthropology in the usual sense (study of physical characteristics). History of economic analysis 116 agglomerations of elemental impressions and produced by their random ‘associations.’ This resolution of the human ‘mind’ or ‘soul’ into atomic impressions may be likened to the reduction of all physical phenomena to atomistic mechanics, a much employed analogy that made empiricism popular to some and hateful to other people. The reader will please observe that the term Empiricism is here used in what is only one of its many meanings, which is why the adjective Philosophical is added. It has, in particular, nothing whatever to do with Scientific Empiricism, a term that merely denotes the attitude that extols the roles of experiment and observation at the expense of that of ‘theory.’ More specific labels are Sensualism or Sensationalism. As a philosophy, Empiricism or Sensualism or Sensationalism, although brilliantly defended by Hume in the eighteenth century and by J.S. Mill in the nineteenth, and although it always had a considerable vogue among English nonphilosophers, did not wear well. Leibniz raised the obvious though not decisive objection—what is it?—at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Bishop Berkeley, a little later, produced a different argument that amounted to rejection (Principles of Human Knowledge, 1710), and even in England, let alone Scotland or Germany, the battle among professional philosophers went mostly against it. But Associationist Psychology fared much better and in fact commanded the explicit or implicit allegiance of English economists and their continental allies until about 1900 and beyond. A distinguished economist, James Mill, is even responsible for its most uncompromising nineteenth-century exposition. By Psychological Associationism we mean exactly the same doctrine that we called Philosophical Empiricism before. The difference that calls for a separate term is this. Whereas the latter is, or pretends to be, a philosophy in the strict sense of the term and also an epistemology or theory of knowledge, the former denotes the same doctrine, but considered as a fundamental hypothesis in the study of the various problems that come within the professional field of psychology, such as the theory of imagination, or attention, or language, and so on. The reader is requested to keep all this in mind for future reference. Another point cannot be too strongly impressed upon the reader. The scholastic doctors had taught the doctrines of natural liberty and natural equality of men. With them, however, this natural equality was not an assertion about facts of human nature but a moral ideal or postulate: it rested on Christian beliefs such as that the Saviour died for the salvation of all. But Hobbes, when explaining the conditions that produce his original state of war of all against all, asserted as a fact (Leviathan, ch. 13) that man’s faculties of mind and body are about equal in the sense that the range of their variations is so narrowly limited as to make complete equality a permissible working hypothesis. And this was the general opinion of the philosophers. Henceforth we denote this proposition by the phrase Analytic Equalitarianism in order to distinguish it from the Christian ideal, which we shall call Normative Equalitarianism. Now, first, it should be obvious that analytic equalitarianism is of immense importance, not only for economic sociology and The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 117 not only for the wider implications of economics proper, but also for many problems of economic theory itself. We need only replace it by the opposite assertion of fact in order to realize that this would change the whole picture of the economic process. Second, with few exceptions and with little qualification, most economists have accepted, and are accepting to this day, analytic equalitarianism. But they never made any serious attempt to verify it, though one would think that they had every reason for making sure of the reliability of such a pillar of their analytic structures. We shall return to this most curious fact in our survey of the Wealth of Nations. (d) Contribution to Economics. The economics of the philosophers could have been taken from Molina. It will suffice to advert to the well-rounded presentation in Pufendorf’s treatise. Distinguishing value in use and value in exchange (or pretium eminens), he lets the latter be determined by the relative scarcity or abundance of goods and money. Market price then gravitates toward the costs that must normally be incurred in production. His analysis of interest (in which he proves himself not averse to biblical quotations) is distinctly inferior to that of the late scholastics. He goes on to discuss various problems of public policy, such as the repression of luxury by sumptuary laws, the regulation of monopolies, craft guilds, inheritance, entails, population. Good sense and moderation are invariably in evidence as is also a sense of the historic flux of things. The welfare aspect is always kept in view. Again, we behold an embryonic Wealth of Nations. 7. THE PHILOSOPHERS OF NATURAL LAW: NATURAL-LAW ANALYSIS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER By 1700, developments that are to be surveyed in the next chapter had already outdistanced the economics of the philosophers of natural law. It will prove helpful, however, to stay for a moment in order to follow the subsequent fortunes of that little body of economic truth until it loses its individuality and, merging with a broader stream, vanishes from our sight (see below, subsec. g). The sixty or seventy years that preceded the French Revolution are commonly referred to as the Enlightenment. This phrase is meant to indicate quickened advance on many fronts, or rather a quickened sense of advance—general enthusiasm for progress and reforms. Applying reason to what appeared to be the heap of nonsense inherited from the past was the program of the epoch. A wave of religious, political, and economic criticism that was pathetically uncritical of its own dogmatic standards swept over the intellectual centers of Europe. French society in particular was rapidly disintegrating, but as yet felt perfectly safe. Like all disintegrating societies that do not want to face their danger, it delighted in protecting its enemies and thus provided a milieu of unique charm for a literature that will attract even those of us who sense a flavor of decay—and sometimes, what is worse, also a flavor of mediocrity— when they turn to these old volumes that harbor so much complacency. The best antidote to the compliments that the men of that self-styled Age of Reason were in the habit of paying to themselves is to read them. Fortunately, there are better performances to record than those of Voltaire and Rousseau. History of economic analysis 118 It is, however, impossible to convey, in the space available, a picture of either that intellectual situation or its social background. 1 We can only touch upon the irreducible minimum of essential points. [(a) The Science of Human Nature: Psychologism.] The only fact that need be noticed in matters of theology is that a Natural Theology as distinguished from the sacra doctrina—remember that this distinction goes back to the thirteenth century—definitely established itself as a separate field of laical social science. Its properly theological contents tended to shrink to an insipid Deism. 2 But more interesting was the development of a sociology of religion—a theory of the origin and social practice of religious ideas—the first substantial beginnings of which we located with Hobbes. The most important fact about philosophical thought is the victorious progress of English empiricism or sensationalism—of Hobbes’s and Locke’s teaching— which is all the more remarkable because, methodologically, it does not agree as well as does philosophical rationalism with all the claims that were being made, in theology and 1 Both have been described innumerable times. It is very difficult, however, to present a helpful selection. Perhaps the best advice to give is that the reader turn to Hippolyte Taine’s famous book, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1876–93) or to Henri Sée’s Les Idées politiques en France au XVIII e siècle (1920). But the portrait not only of an individual but of a civilization is so excellently drawn by Lytton Strachey in a brief essay on Morellet (Portraits in Miniature, 1931) that half an hour invested in reading it plus another half-hour of pondering over it will do more for the reader than would many hours spent on heavier works. For England, Sir Leslie Stephen’s old standard work, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), or his English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904), and H.J.Laski’s Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham (1920) may be recommended. J.Bonar’s Philosophy and Political Economy (3rd ed., 1922) is always a stand-by, of course. 2 This statement illustrates well the difficulties inherent in the drawing of any sketches such as this. It had to be made in order not to miss an important background fact, and it is of course true. Nevertheless, it is quite misleading in its effects. On the one hand, it misses the affinity of mere Deism with frank philosophical materialism and hence its true nature. Therefore, let us note the fact that philosophical materialism also developed in a form in which it was not known in the Middle Ages. Holbach’s Système de la nature (1770) may stand as an example. On the other hand, the statement in our text neglects the fact that in the eighteenth century there were a number of religious revivals which are the symptoms of currents that perhaps sum up to more than the Deism and materialism combined. This holds even for France: the intellectual activity within the French Church is, of course, not wholly represented by infidel abbés whose cloth was important to them chiefly as a title to pre-bends. In this connection, the activities of the Société de l’abbaye de Saint- Germaindes Prés, of which Jean Mabillon was the center, should be mentioned. We must hurry on, however. The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 119 elsewhere, on behalf of la raison. This, of course, greatly favored the success of associationist psychology. Let us call a halt in order to glance at three figures who are not only of outstanding importance for us but also representative of the spirit of the age at its highest, Condillac, Hume, and Hartley. The first two we shall meet again in the role of simple economists. The third points directly to James Mill’s performance of 1829. 3 All three did not philosophize simply for the sake of philosophizing but in order to develop the Science of Man or of Human Nature that was to be the basis of the science—or the sciences—of society: more than anything else, they were metasociologists or philosophical anthropologists. No doubt, they were convinced that both in aim and method—the ‘experimental’ method, for which they invoked 3 Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–80; Oeuvres complètes, 1821–2; see, for general information, R.Lenoir’s Condillac, 1924), worked out Locke’s sensationalism into an elaborate system (Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 1746; Traité des sensations, 1754), which constitutes the most important continental response to the English lead, both in its philosophical and in its psychological aspects. But the achievement does not consist in systematic elaboration only, for the work presents many original elements, and some of them, such as the theory of the role of language and other symbolisms (Langue de calculs, 1798), point far into the future, in spite of the introspective method used, even to the Watsonian behaviorism of our time. David Hume (1711–76)—who, among other things, exerted formative influence on A.Smith— claims our attention in three quite different and almost unconnected incarnations: as an economist, in which incarnation he swam outside of the natural-law current now under discussion; as a historian, in which incarnation he will be noticed presently; and as a philosopher and metasociologist, which is the incarnation that matters just now. The work of his youth—strikingly illustrative both of the truth of Ostwald’s thesis that original creation is the privilege of men under thirty and of the other truth that part of this subjective originality is due to the young author’s blissful ignorance of the previous development of his subject—the Treatise of Human Nature: being an Attempt to introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning [sic, J.A.S.] into Moral Subjects (1st two vols., 1739, 3rd vol., 1740), remodeled (infelicitously) into the Philosophical Essays of 1748 (republished as Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 1758) is the most important stepping-stone between Locke and Kant, far above the former and almost on the intellectual level of the latter. The most important contribution was Hume’s theory of causality. This also was Hume’s opinion, for it is this topic he singled out for relatively full treatment in the Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature which he published in 1740 and which was retrieved and republished in 1938 with an introduction by J.M.Keynes and P.Sraffa. Works (modern ed. by Green and Grose, with introduction and bibliography); Life and Correspondence by J.H.Burton (1846); Letters to Strahan, ed. by J.Birkbeck Hill (1888). Further Letters of great interest, ed. by J.Y.T.Greig (1932). David Hartley (1705–57) was not, any more than was Condillac, the father of associationist psychology. But his Observations on Man…(1749) did for it what, to use an economic analogy that the reader will appreciate later, Malthus’ Essay on Population was to do for the theory contained in it. Also he imparted to it a slant that was new, so far as I know: he linked sense impressions and their associations with ‘nerve vibrations’ and thus psychology with physiology. Finally, he worked out a theory of ethics and even of natural theology on this basis. History of economic analysis 120 the authority of Francis Bacon—their work meant a new departure. All the more important is it to realize that this was not the case. In aim as well as in method they had been clearly anticipated by Hobbes. But we know that Hobbes, though original in a number of important individual points, was a philosopher of natural law like Grotius or Pufendorf and that in fundamental aim and method he did not differ from them. Condillac, Hume, and Hartley were certainly more articulate; with clearer purpose, they developed this science of human nature more fully. The idea of this science itself, however, and the program of deriving from it the basic propositions of the individual social sciences are the idea and the program of the philosophers of natural law and indirectly of the scholastics. The affinity shows in many details: for instance, the germs of associationist psychology are to be found in Aristotle’s concepts of similarity and contiguity and in the corresponding concepts of scholastic psychology. Moreover, the methods actually used by the eighteenth-century men were exactly the same as, and in particular not more ‘experimental’ than, those of their predecessors. Therefore, just as we expressed an important aspect of the work of the philosophers of natural law by calling them laical scholastics, so we may now express an important aspect of the work of the Condillacs, Humes, and Hartleys by calling them eighteenth-century philosophers of natural law. 4 Two points about this science of man are of special interest for us. First, the metasociology of Condillac, Hartley, and Hume was essentially psychological. And their associationist psychology was essentially introspective, that is to say, it admitted the analyst’s observation of his own psychic processes as a valid source of information, Both these features are of obvious significance for the history of economic analysis but we are now particularly interested in the first. Those authors and most of their contemporaries evidently believed that psychological considerations will explain not only the psychological mechanisms of individual and group behavior, and the ways in which social facts are reflected in, and interpreted by, individual or group minds, but also these social facts themselves. They would not have denied, of course, that in order to explain any actual event, institution, or process we must also take account of facts other than psychological. But they did not develop any general theories about them or admit them into their metasociology: the only stock of general knowledge needed in all the branches of science that have anything to do with human actions or attitudes was psychology and all these branches of science were nothing but applied psychology. This view is, however, not the only possible one. We may think that other than psychological data, for instance, geographical, technological, biological facts are much more important in the practical work of analysis than anything a psychological science of human nature has to contribute. Hence metasociology should be built up from materials other than psychological; and even—which was, for instance, the opinion of Karl Marx— 4 The affinity I wished to exhibit may be underlined by a contrast: modern specialists in the various social sciences never think of looking to a mother science of human nature for guidance. They just attack the facts and problems of their special fields directly, using the methods and making the hypotheses that seem most useful for their particular purposes. In fact, if there be any particular ‘modernity’ about such authors as Hume—apart from their hostility to metaphysics—it would have to be found in the facts that they failed to carry out their program and that, as economists, for instance, they actually reasoned without much reference to their science of human nature. This is one of the reasons why their economics will be dealt with separately. The scholastic doctors and the philosophers 121 . sense (study of physical characteristics). History of economic analysis 116 agglomerations of elemental impressions and produced by their random ‘associations.’ This resolution of the human. worked out a theory of ethics and even of natural theology on this basis. History of economic analysis 120 the authority of Francis Bacon—their work meant a new departure. All the more. source of information, Both these features are of obvious significance for the history of economic analysis but we are now particularly interested in the first. Those authors and most of their