As explained above, the Cours presents two aspects which must be carefully distinguished. First, it expounds the doctrine that all our knowledge is knowledge of invariant relations between given phenomena on whose nature or causation there is no sense in speculating. This positivism brought earlier tendencies to a head and anticipated, in some respects, the much more interesting empiriocriticism of the next period. It is a philo-sophical doctrine in the technical sense of the term—though a negative one—and as such did not exert, and was incapable of exerting, any influence upon research in any particular science. But, second, Comte’s primary concern was not really with this philosophy. The Cours starts with the question how, in an epoch of inevitable specialization, we might salvage that organic unity of all human knowledge that was so vital a reality in the times of the polyhistors. His answer was that we should create for this purpose another specialty, the specialty of généralités. This plan has meaning quite independently of whatever philosophic opinions one might entertain and comes to the fore again later on. The Cours is an attempt to carry this plan into effect in a particular way and with a particular slant. Comte’s particular way was this: he tried to arrange the total of all scientific knowledge (knowledge from other than scientific sources he did not recognize) into a hierarchy of sciences or, to change the simile, into a building, every floor of which was to be occupied by a different science and which was to rise from foundations in logic and mathematics toward the problems of human society. The six floors were respectively assigned to Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and— Psychology being conspicuous by its absence—Sociology, the science of society. And he actually proceeded, if I may keep to the analogy, to furnish every floor with what he conceived to be those elements in every science that were most important for the science located on the next floor. Nothing can or need be said about the grandeur and the shortcomings of the plan or of its execution. Comte’s influence upon the social sciences in general, and upon economics in particular, was considerable and gathered momentum as the century wore on. This was not because of his ‘philosophy,’ but because he did sociological work himself. We shall have to touch upon contributions of his—constructive and critical—both in the rest of this chapter and in later chapters. It will be convenient, however, to list the four most important ones, and to dispose of two of them at once: (I) Comte baptized nascent sociology and sketched out a research program for it that foreshadowed later developments in Social Psychology; (II) this sociology is geared, as we shall see, to an eighteenth-century conception of social evolution; (III) he introduced into the social sciences the concepts of Statics and Dynamics; (IV) he developed a methodology that led him to attack the procedure of ‘classic’ economics in a manner that anticipated many later criticisms. I shall proceed to comment on (III) and (IV). History of economic analysis 392 (III) Comte was primarily concerned with social evolution (see below, sec. 4d). But he fully realized that the idea of evolution does not cover all the problems presented by social organisms. There are also nonevolutionary phenomena or aspects that require a different treatment. Therefore he assembled another body of facts and propositions about ‘social instincts,’ which act and react upon one another so as to produce by means of an equilibrating process the ‘spontaneous order of society’; and this body of facts and propositions he laid alongside the evolutionary compound, or, as he styled it, the theory of ‘natural progress.’ Adopting, as he tells us, the terminology of the zoologist H.de Blainville, he called the former Statics and the latter Dynamics. J.S.Mill, the author who introduced these terms into economic theory, was well acquainted with Comte’s thought, and it is natural to assume that he took them from Comte, though he did not say so. If this was the case, then Mill was wrong in speaking (Principles, Book IV, ch. 1) of ‘a happy generalization of a mathematical phrase.’ Since many people who failed to appreciate the importance of that distinction have tried to stigmatize it as an illegitimate derivate of a mechanistic way of thinking, it is time to state the fact that, so far as there is sense at all in talking about borrowing—as regards the words that is, not as regards the distinction itself which forces itself upon us in any case—the ultimate lender was not mechanics but zoology. We shall return to the subject more than once. It should, however, be mentioned that Mill’s definitions of statics and dynamics correspond to Comte’s, as far as I can see; but these terms subsequently acquired several different senses and are now being used in a still different one. (IV) Methodologically, Comte’s plan was to observe historical and ethnological facts and to build his science of society from such generalizations as these facts would suggest. This is, of course, a very familiar program that was, then and later, espoused by numerous writers, especially by historical economists. All the more important is it to realize a paradoxical fact: while it was perfectly natural for historical economists to adopt this plan, it was not at all natural for Comte to do so. The historian, and hence the historical economist, distrusts any theory that tries to ‘isolate’ the economic element in social life. Theory is for him indeed speculative and unrealistic. It is even something still worse: it is speculative construction that borrows its methods from the physical sciences. Only the real phenomenon in all its historical facets—with the economic, ethical, legal, and cultural facets all simultaneously considered—is for him the true object of social research, whose methods must therefore differ toto cælo from any used by the physicist. But Comte could not argue like this. On the contrary, he wanted to adopt the methods of the physicist. When he accused ‘classic’ economists of unscientific speculation, he meant exactly the opposite of what the economists of the historical school were to mean. And there, as J.S.Mill realized, he was completely in error. But in addition to being in error as regards his criticism, he was also in error as regards his own choice of method. For The Intellectual scenery 393 physical science does not accept unanalyzed fact: either in the laboratory or (where laboratory experiment is not possible) by mental experiment, physicists do separate or isolate individual aspects and then theorize about them with a boldness that far surpasses anything that economists ever ventured to do. Had Comte wished to be ‘scientific’ in this sense, he could not have adopted any method other than that followed by Bentham, Say, and later by J.S.Mill. He adopted the one he did adopt (generalization from unanalyzed historical or ethnological fact) by mistake and, if he anticipated some of the later arguments of the historical school, he anticipated them, again, by mistake—honest ignorance of economics and Saint-Simonian prejudice against it being, of course, the psychological sources of both. The comedy of errors will be complete when we realize that, on top of it all, he indulged in genuinely metaphysical speculation himself. This clarification reduces considerably our conception of Comte’s influence: the later historical economists of the Schmoller school were not Comtists at all; their philosophical and methodological affiliations were quite different; they arrived at their arguments against ‘classic’ theory from the logic of their own intellectual position and would have arrived at them even if Comte had never lived; it is merely a coincidence that, as it was, these arguments, or some of them, look Comtist to the historian. 15 With other exponents of historicism, Comte’s influence is more in evidence. (On Ingram, for example, see below, Part IV, ch. 4.) 2. ROMANTICISM AND HISTORIOGRAPHY We might learn a lot about the Zeitgeist from surveying the literary currents of that period were it possible to do so. Very interesting inferences could be drawn, for example, from the success of the novels of Dickens, Thackeray, or Flaubert, which are also really sociological treatises—highly colored by ideologies that we do not usually attribute to the people who read them. Or to mention but one other and far distant example, we might also learn a lot by analyzing the burst of German enthusiasm for Greek art that started in the eighteenth century 1 but survived well into the nineteenth. We must refrain. But there was one literary movement, Romanticism, that we cannot afford to pass by, partly because of its real importance for the development of the social sciences, partly because of the importance that has been wrongly attributed to it. 15 This is not true for sociology: many sociologists, especially French ones, did descend from Comte (de Roberty, Durkheim, and others). But as regards the economists who faced each other in the Battle of Methods, Menger, the theorist, was much more Comtist than was Schmoller, the historian. History of economic analysis 394 (a) Romanticism. Like its cultural antipode, utilitarianism, the romantic movement started in the eighteenth century: we, who are primarily interested in its analytic performance, cannot do better than to choose as our landmark the great name of Herder. 2 Unlike utilitarianism, romanticism was not a philosophy, or a social creed, or a political or economic ‘system.’ It was essentially a literary fashion that linked up with a certain attitude toward life and art: on the one hand, the movement was entirely confined to intellectual circles—there are no romanticists who were not also literati; on the other hand, the movement gained international importance primarily in the field of belles lettres and in the neighboring fields of literary criticism and philology. For painting, architecture, and music it meant less—though it also set fashions there, witness, for example, some ‘Gothic’ horrors—and it influenced but peripherically whatever else it touched. But from the history of literature it is indeed possible to compile an impressive list of names, such as Byron, Alfieri, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Longfellow, Chateaubriand, Gautier, Hugo, Hölderlin, Novalis, Brentano, Arnim, and the two Schlegels. 3 It is there that we must look for the achievement of romanticism and for the serious work of the romanticists. They no doubt sallied forth from that stronghold, as literati will, and roamed all over those parts of philosophy and social science that happened to attract them. It is with their exploits on these excursions that we are concerned here. But we must bear in mind that in dealing with these we are not dealing with the core of romanticist achievement and that we must expect any grain we may find to be mixed with dilettantic chaff. However, even as regards belles lettres we cannot help being struck by a fact that is indeed evident from our little list of names and would stand out still more clearly in any more extended one: works and men that in one sense or another may be labeled romanticist often have very little in common and look strange in juxtaposition. This will cease to surprise us as soon as we make an attempt to define what the romanticist attitude consisted in. On the surface, it spelled revolt against classic canons of art, for instance, 1 J.J.Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, a book, both symptomatically and causally important, appeared in 1764. 2 J.G.von Herder (1744–1803): Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Litteratur (1767), the most definitely romanticist of his works; Über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772); Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91), for us the most important of his writings. But Herder’s thought transcends romanticism: influence from and influence on romanticism is but one aspect of his work. As a sociol-ogist he also experienced and exerted influence of an environmentalist type (see below, sec. 3c); he fought Kant’s aesthetics in an almost empiricist spirit, and there are passages in his Ideen on cultural change that have a Spencerian ring; his theories of language, literature, art, religion, mythology—including the methodological suggestions in the direction of comparative philology and comparative mythology and hierology—make him the precursor of several important modern, as they make him the heir to several important eighteenth-century, tendencies, including tendencies enshrined in the Hobbes-Locke-Hume tradition. If we cannot go into these cross currents of ideas that elucidate many features of the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist, our comfort must be that they entirely failed to fertilize economics. 3 Goethe is too great to be pigeonholed and, moreover, disliked the romanticists intensely. But his work, both at dawn and at sunset, displays many romanticist elements. It is only in between that Goethe was, or tried to be, severely ‘classic.’ The Intellectual scenery 395 against Aristotle’s three dramatic unities (of time, place, and action). But below this surface, there was something much more important, namely, revolt against convention, particularly against rationalized convention: feeling (possibly genuine) rose against cold reason; spontaneous impulse against ultilitarian logic; intuition against analysis; the ‘soul’ against the intellect; the romance of national history against the artefacts of the Enlightenment. Let us call this attitude anti-intellectualism, although this term will also be used in a different sense below. Remembering that the romantic movement was confined to in-tellectuals—and therefore was something quite different from what we may term the common man’s anti-intellectualism—we should not flinch at the apparently paradoxical designation, intellectual anti-intellectualism. Viewed like this, the phenomenon of romanticism really comes within a well-known class: like other workmen, intellectuals seem from time to time to get disgusted with their tools and to be possessed with a desire to ‘down’ them and to use their fists instead. This diagnosis explains, among other things, why it is impossible to systematize romanticism into a coherent whole and to develop rules that would enable us to identify romanticist ideas or programs as easily as we can identify, for example, utilitarian ideas or programs. The movement was in the nature of a shake-up. Its fertility was principally due to this fact. The individual who experienced its impact was left free to walk in any direction after having been shaken up. This applies particularly to the political and economic views of individual romanticists which later historians have tried to unify in directions of which they themselves approved if they were sympathetic, and in directions of which they disapproved if they were hostile. The resulting picture was unrealistic in both cases. Romanticism has been identified with political ‘reaction’; it is true that many romanticists, following the tendencies of their time, turned conservative or ‘reactionary’ when their environments did, and that some of them even sold their services to ‘reactionary’ governments; but the essentially revolutionary character of the movement was never quite lost, as may be gathered from the case of that powerful leader of opinion, Joseph von Görres. Romanticist ideology has been contrasted with Benthamite ideas about liberty and democracy; again it is true that romanticist liberty was not the liberty of J.S.Mill’s essay and that romanticist democracy was not Bentham’s mechanistic thing; but it might be urged that some romanticists had a deeper understanding of what liberty and democracy meant to people as they are and think and feel than had the utilitarians or than has anyone who tries to impose a logical scheme of his making on existing social patterns. Romanticism has also been credited with a strong taste—taste is the right word, since we are speaking of literati—for the Roman Catholic faith; it is true that the romanticists, with their sense for live realities, were bound to look upon that mighty structure with feelings very different from those of the utilitarians; it is also true that, at least in the early nineteenth century, their movement went parallel with and was related to, a Catholic revival; but it is quite wrong to confuse the two. Few of the true leaders of the Catholic movement (Görres is the most important instance, Chateaubriand a doubtful one) were prominent in the romantic movement; most of them stood to it on a footing of cool and reciprocated indifference. Finally, if romanticism has been associated with ‘universalist’ social philosophies, this was only because romanticists were opposed to rationalist individualism of the utilitarian type; but the feeling, the intuition, the impulse they extolled were subjective and individual feeling, intuition, and impulse—this extreme subjectivism, which knew no binding rule, was precisely what set Goethe against them. History of economic analysis 396 What, the reader may well ask, can have been contributed to economics by a movement such as this? The answer will, of course, read differently according to whether we think of attitudes to practical problems, ideological haloes, humors, and so on, or of technical analysis. A romanticist or any writer influenced by the romantic attitude would, of course, look upon industrial life and its problems in a nonbourgeois spirit and take views quite different from the Benthamite ones. More generally, he would feel a healthy disgust at the utilitarian tendency to reduce the colorful variety of social patterns and processes to a few bald generalizations about thoroughly rationalized hedonic interests. And he would build where utilitarianism leaves a void—or else provides a dump for what is simply nonsense from its standpoint—a shrine for the historically unique and for the values of the extrarational (though, as the discussion above shows, these values differed greatly from one romanticist to another). As voiced by some romanticist writers, much of this does not quite ring true. It should be clear, however, that not all of it was literary fake. The standpoint that is appropriate for a history of the search for scientific truth is not appropriate for a comprehensive appraisal. Nevertheless, we may list definite contributions to positive analysis. There are none to be recorded so far as technical economics is concerned. Considering the nature of the movement, this is only what we should expect and does not even amount to a criticism. Enthusiastic lovers of romanticism seem to me to have committed a tactical mistake by insisting on the presence of contributions of this nature, especially because it forced them to make a hero of such a man as Adam Müller (1779–1829). As far as this goes, it should be frankly admitted that there never was such a thing as a ‘romantic school of economics’ at all. It was, I think, W.Roscher who gave currency to that phrase by his paper, ‘Die romantische Schule der Nationalökonomik in Deutschland,’ Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 1870, and who covered Müller with unmerited praise. Modern ‘universalists,’ having been hard put to it to find other members for this ‘school,’ have resorted to three devices: first, they included men such as F.Gentz and K.L.von Haller (the interested reader is invited to look them up in any work of reference), who were no economists at all; second, they claimed for the school famous men who had but the most tenuous relation to it, if indeed any, such as F.List; third, they applied themselves to the task of unearthing additional members who were duly dubbed geniuses, such as Franz von Baader (Sozietätsphilosophie, in his Sämtliche Werke, 1854), who may pass for a sociologist. As to Adam Müller himself (mainly: Elemente der Staatskunst, 1809, new ed., 1922; Versuche einer neuen Theorie des Geldes…, 1816, new ed., 1922; Von der Notwendigkeit einer theologischen Grundlage der gesamten Staatswissenschaften, 1819; a selection of papers has been edited by Dr. Jacob Baxa, who also wrote a life of Müller with complete bibliography, 1930), it is sufficient to state that his economics consists in a negative revaluation of part of A.Smith’s facts and arguments—of laissez-faire, free trade, division of labor, and so on—which is his and not our affair, and in the introduction of a number of wholly inoperative metaphysical conceptions. Suppose even that there is any sense in saying, for instance, that money is money only in the moment it changes hands and that in this moment it is not private (allod, as he called it) but public property (feod), or that it is the expression of ‘national value’ or ‘national force’—what of it? Such interpretations of metaphysical meanings are by nature The Intellectual scenery 397 incapable of telling us anything that we do not already know about the relations subsisting in the empirical world. On the other hand, I do not wish to go further than this. I have no intention of paralleling the ignorance that fails to appreciate the tasks and methods of analysis by equally ignorant failure to appreciate the tasks and methods of philosophic vision or interpretation of meanings. It is enough for me if I can make the reader understand that these are two different worlds that do not touch anywhere and neither of which can tell us anything about the phenomena—or whatever the word should be—in the other without reducing its own arguments to futility. In order to make this point stand out strongly, I refrain from asking the question how good or bad A.Müller’s speculations are when considered as philosophies. 4 It seems possible, however, to speak of a romanticist sociology or at least of definite contributions of romanticist writers to economic, political, and general sociology. One has been mentioned already: we may restate it by saying that it consists in the insertion, into the analysis of institutions and of behavior within institutions, of the compound of nonrational—not necessarily irrational—human volitions, habits, beliefs, and so on, which largely make a given society what it is and without which a society and its pattern of reaction cannot be understood. The names of Herder and Novalis 5 may be mentioned as illustrations. The artistic component in romanticism is, in particular, responsible for emphasis upon psychological relations and reactions, a fact which lends some color to the view that the romanticists were forerunners of modern social psychology. 6 The outstanding example of contributions of this kind are the concepts of a National Soul (Volksseele), a National Character, and a National Fate. Such concepts came readily to literati and they acquired with them an emotional connotation. But the sentiments, as well as any philosophical visions, may be dropped, whereupon the National Soul reveals itself as a catch-all for a number of very important facts. Even as an entity it has appealed to many later sociologists of the group-mind type. How very ‘positive’ a thing can be made of it is shown by the fact that we also find it in so thoroughly unromanticist a writer as Comte. But the chief importance of the romanticist movement for analytic economics consists in the impulse it gave to all kinds of historical research. It taught us better understanding of civilizations other than our own—the Mid-dle Ages, for example, and extra-European cultural worlds as well. This meant new vistas, wider horizons, fresh problems, and, above all, the end of the stupid contempt that 4 It is on this question only that meaningful difference of opinion is possible between us and the modern universalist admirers of A.Müller. And with this statement they should really agree— especially as I am also prepared to concede political value judgments—because they have always affected to despise the field for which I claim autonomy from romantic or any other metaphysical speculation. 5 Novalis was the pseudonym of Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), German poet. A fragmentary theory of society may be compiled from his unsystematized writing (Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Obenauer, 1925). There is an essay on him by Carlyle, which does not, however, go much beyond artistic aspects. 6 I do not share this view without qualification (see below, Part IV, ch. 3, sec. 3e). History of economic analysis 398 Voltairians and utilitarians professed for everything that preceded ‘this enlightened age.’ 7 Let us glance at the most important of the cases where romanticist influence, national soul and all, shows unmistakably, on the surface at least: the emergence of the Historical School of Jurisprudence. This school acquires additional significance for us because it helped to produce a similar movement in economics. 8 After the Wars of Liberation, national exhilaration asserted itself in many proposals that, more or less directly, pointed toward a unified Germany. Among them were proposals for codifying the German law. One of these—by a prominent jurist, Thibaut— was adversely criticized in a pamphlet by Savigny that attracted nationwide attention. 9 Its argument rose high above the particular occasion and amounts to a general sociology of law: the legal institutions of a nation are part of its individual life as a nation and the expression of the whole of it, and of the whole of its historically determined situation; they embody all the intimate relations and necessities of this life which find in them more or less adequate formulation; they fit as does the skin of the human body; to replace them by a rationally excogitated code is like tearing off a body’s skin in order to replace it by a synthetic product. Hence—this is what matters to us—the necessity of studying law not from the standpoint of a few rational principles, but within the framework of all its bearings on the national soul or character. Hence the conclusion—in exact opposition to the Benthamite view—that the only method for scientific jurisprudence to pursue is the historical 7 Théophile Gautier occasionally used the phrase moyennagiste as a synonym for romanticist, and the two phrases seem in fact to have meant much the same for the whole romanticist cénacle in Paris. This cult of medieval civilization did not fail, of course, to elicit liberalist sneers, the more so because it involved unhistorical idealizations as well as (in the case of Gautier) red waistcoats. But we must see through and condone the inevitable pranks of literati: if ignorance entered into this cult, much more ignorance had entered into that of la raison. 8 The influence of the historical school of jurisprudence is particularly evident in the case of Roscher, who took arguments from the jurists and attached importance to what he considered to be a close parallelism between the situations in the legal and the economic fields. In other cases, that of R.Jones for instance (see below, ch. 6), no such influence can be proved. 9 Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (1814), by Friedrich Karl von Savigny (1779–1861), an academic jurist of established reputation, who had, by an earlier work of striking originality (Recht des Besitzes, 1803), rejuvenated the decadent jurisprudence of his day. By the foundation, with Eichhorn (who represents the Germanist element in the alliance, as Savigny represents the Romanist), of the Zeitschrift für geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft (1815), by his Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (1815–31), and by his System des heutigen römischen Rechts (1840–49), he rose to a position of recognized leadership in the German legal world of his day, both in the academic and (in Prussia) in the official sense. This leadership meant the victory, for the time being, of the historical school. But he should not be called its ‘founder.’ As could be shown had we space, he brilliantly led and developed a tendency, all the seeds of which had been sown before. The Intellectual scenery 399 one. 10 This, in a nutshell, was the creed and program of the historical school of jurisprudence. Owing to the use of the concept of a national soul and character, the relation between this historical sociology of law and specifically romanticist thought stands out strongly, perhaps more strongly than it should. For common sense tells us that there would have been historical jurisprudence even if there had not been any romanticism. This also applies to those German economists who, having undergone legal training or having what by a later American term we may call an institutionalist bent, were no doubt influenced by the example of the historical school of jurisprudence. (b) Historiography. The extent to which the rich developments in that period’s professional historiography are to be credited to romanticist ideas is still more debatable. It is true that the romanticist mood stimulated interest in historical research and increased the public’s receptiveness to its results. Beyond this it is not safe to go without more specific reasons than a general belief in the all-pervading influence of romanticism. But it seems to me that one such reason does in fact exist. The period had indeed a large number of historians who pleaded a cause, the cause of a country or of a political system or a party, or made it their business to grade—yes, as a schoolmaster grades his pupil’s books—the men and events reported on, according to moral or cultural standards of their own. 11 A tendency toward taking a different line as- 10 These points must be kept in mind if misunderstanding is to be avoided: (1) This sociology of law is not quietist or hostile to reform. It only sponsors ‘organic’ reform from ‘organic’ necessities as against reform from speculative principles. Savigny himself, as Grand Chancellor, carried reforms. (2) This sociology, by virtue of its emphasis upon historically given conditions, has a side that might be described as ‘national.’ But it has no ‘nationalistic’ implications whatsoever. (3) Even reforms carried out in the historical spirit presuppose certain general principles and deductions from them. Savigny overlooked this and his program was therefore, however great its merits, scientifically inadequate. From our standpoint as economists, it is very important, on the one hand, to notice this error and, on the other hand, to realize that it does not necessarily impair the usefulness of the historical method. 11 Thus, Lord Macaulay pleaded the causes not only of England, but also of the Whig party: he made no effort to understand any other standpoints. Michelet glorified France; Droysen, Prussian policy; Dahlmann and von Rotteck pleaded for liberalism and constitutionalism; Grote for Athenian democracy (George Grote, History of Greece, 1st ed., 1846–56, is of particular interest to us because he was an orthodox Benthamite and one of the most important members of the philosophical-radical circle); G.Bancroft for Jacksonian democracy. In all such cases there is, irrespective of any conscious intention of the authors, obvious danger of ideological distortion of facts. But even if all facts are reported with scrupulous impartiality, they will still stand, as it were, in an artificial light—the light of the writer’s convictions or creed—and not in their own. Consider an additional example of a somewhat different type: W.E.H.Lecky (especially History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 1865), one of the relatively few nineteenth- century exponents of the eighteenth-century raison. To begin with, he wrote from a definite sociology of history that makes ideas the prime movers of the historical process. In addition, he re- duced the march of ideas to a scheme that is unaware of anything but an increasingly successful struggle of reason with religion. He thus produced a report that stands and falls with a definite creed and has no meaning irrespective of it. I use this opportunity to advert to the problems that History of economic analysis 400 arise from the naïve habit of historians who have no axe to grind or cause to plead but set themselves up as judges of all things human, who know all motives and are in possession of all standards of behavior. An example will illustrate. The great Mommsen was a conspicuous victim of the self-delusion involved: he knew how the Roman legions should have been handled in the battle on the Trebbia; he knew how Cicero ought to have dealt with Catilina’s conspiracy; he knew what motives swayed Julius Caesar. He never displayed any awareness of the dangerous extent to which he relied on his intuitive comprehension—the comprehension of a no doubt able and respectable middle-nineteenth-century bourgeois mind. This has some obvious bearings also upon procedures of economists. serted itself, however: to present facts in their own light, to let events appear as they might have appeared to the people who experienced them, to preserve the color and the spirit of time and place. This ‘immanent interpretation’ of historical processes evidently raises very serious methodological problems as regards the nature of the intuitive understanding of the individuals and civilizations it involves. For us it is of particular interest because of the close affinity of its principles to those of Max Weber. It is primarily associated with the name of Leopold von Ranke. 12 A French sponsor of it was Augustin Thierry. The work of these and other men was, in its scholarly aspects, neutral to romanticism and, in other aspects, even hostile to it. But their respect for the autonomy of every culture and for its individual color constitutes an affinity with romanticist ideas that we must not overlook. For the rest, since it is impossible to report on that period’s historiography so as to convey an adequate impression, we must confine ourselves to a brief survey of those features of it that are most relevant for economics. In the first place, there were the new materials and the new standards of criticism. It was during this period that historiography definitely stepped out of the range of literary sources and—systematically and on a large scale—began to use original documents and the information that is enshrined in monuments, inscriptions, coins, and the like. Cuneiform writing (Grotefend) and hieroglyphs (Champollion) yielded their secrets. Techniques for the exploitation of source materials were taught, and comprehensive publications of such materials were undertaken: the École des Chartes, the English Rolls Series, and the Monumenta germaniae historica are examples of a purposeful and systematic activity, for which there was no parallel in our own field. Criticism of sources attained new levels, and it was this plus the new materials that produced the achieve-ments of Niebuhr 13 and Mommsen. But 12 Without presuming to proffer my own opinion, I may state that a majority of historians of all countries would agree to call him the first historian of that period. His international influence—also on historiography in the United States—rests mainly on the new standard of historical scholarship that his famous seminar was the means of establishing. His mastery in exploiting new source material and in applying new canons of criticism was of a piece with his refusal to accept the guidance of philosophical (especially Hegelian) ideas. If we notice the romanticist element in his work, it should be added that he himself was careful to distance himself from romanticism. 13 I wish I could stay to sketch the personality and work of this civil servant, scholar, banker, teacher, and ambassador (B.G.Niebuhr, 1776–1831), whose Römische Geschichte (1811–32) placed research in Roman history on a new footing. Among other things, he holds two claims to being considered an economist also: he was an authority on currency policy; he wrote Forschungen zur internationalen Finanz- und Bankgeschichte (A.Trende ed., 1929). Theodor Mommsen’s famous Römische Geschichte appeared 1854–6. The Intellectual scenery 401 . to a general sociology of law: the legal institutions of a nation are part of its individual life as a nation and the expression of the whole of it, and of the whole of its historically determined. revaluation of part of A.Smith’s facts and arguments of laissez-faire, free trade, division of labor, and so on—which is his and not our affair, and in the introduction of a number of wholly. it is of particular interest because of the close affinity of its principles to those of Max Weber. It is primarily associated with the name of Leopold von Ranke. 12 A French sponsor of it