POLITICAL ECONOM Y 391 and he urged or implied, in various places of his above- named work, as well as of his Politigue Positive, objections to their general ideas and methods of procedure essentially the same with those which we stated in speaking of Ricardo and his followers. J. S. Mill shows himself much irritated by these comments, and remarks on them as showing " how extremely superficial M. Comte" (whom he yet regards as a thinker quite comparable with Descartes and Leibnitz) " could sometimes be," an unfortunate observation, which he would scarcely have made if he could have foreseen the subsequent march of European thought, and the large degree in which the main points of Comte s criticism have been accepted or independently reproduced. Germany. The second manifestation of this new move ment in economic science was the appearance of the German historical school. The views of this school do not appear to have arisen, like Comte s theory of sociologi cal method, out of general philosophic ideas ; they seem rather to have been suggested by an extension to the economic field of the conceptions of the historical school of jurisprudence of which Savigny was the most eminent representative. The juristic system is not a fixed social phenomenon, but is variable from one stage in the progress of society to another it is in vital relation with the other coexistent social factors and what is, in the jural sphere, adapted to one period of development is often unfit for another. These ideas were seen to be applicable to the economic system also ; the relative point of view was thus reached, and the absolute attitude was found to be un tenable. Cosmopolitanism in theory, or the assumption of a system equally true of every country, and what has been called perpetualism, or the assumption of a system appli cable to every social stage, were alike discredited. And so the German historical school appears to have taken its rise.
- <;her. Omitting preparatory indications and undeveloped germs
of doctrine, we must trace the origin of the school to Wilhelm Roscher. Its fundamental principles are stated, though with some hesitation, and with an unfortunate con trast of the historical with the "philosophical" method, 1 in his Grundriss zu Vorlesungen iiber die Staatsivirthschaft nach geschichtlicher Methode (1843). The following are the leading heads insisted on in the preface to that work. " The historical method exhibits itself not merely in the external form of a treatment of phenomena according to their chronological succession, but in the following funda mental ideas. (1) The aim is to represent what nations have thought, willed, and discovered in the economic field, what they have striven after and attained, and why they have attained it. (2) A people is not merely the mass of individuals now living ; it will not suffice to observe con temporary facts. (3) All the peoples of whom we can learn anything must be studied and compared from the economic point of view, especially the ancient peoples, whose development lies before us in its totality. (4) We must not simply praise or blame economic institutions; but few of them have been salutary or detrimental to all peoples and at all stages of culture ; rather it is a principal task of science to show how and why, out of what was once reasonable and beneficent, the unwise and inexpedient has often gradually arisen." Of the principles enunciated in this paraphrase of Reseller s words a portion of the third alone seems open to objection ; the economy of ancient peoples is not a more important subject of study than that of the moderns ; indeed the question of the relative importance of the two is one that ought not to be j raised. For the essential condition of all sound sociologi- ! 1 This phraseology was probably borrowed from the controversy on the method of jurisprudence between Thibaut on the one hand and Savigny and Hugo on the other. cal inquiry is the comparative consideration of the entire series of the most complete evolution known to history that, namely, of the group of nations forming what is known as the Occidental Commonwealth, or, more briefly, " the West." The reasons for choosing this social series, and for provisionally restricting our studies almost alto gether to it, have been stated with unanswerable force by Comte in the Philosophic Positive. Greece and Rome are, indeed, elements in the series ; but it is the development as a whole, not any special portions of it, that sociology must keep in view in order to determine the laws of the move ment, just as, in the study of biological evolution, no one stage of an organism can be considered as of preponder ating importance, the entire succession of changes being the object of research. Of Roscher s further eminent services we shall speak hereafter ; he is now mentioned only in relation to the origin of the new school. In 1848 Bruno Hildebrand published the first volume HiMe- of a work, which, though he lived for many years after brand, (d. 1878), he never continued, entitled Die Nationaloko- nomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft. Hildebrand was a thinker of a really high order ; it may be doubted whether amongst German economists there has been any endowed with a more profound and searching intellect. He is quite free from the wordiness and obscurity which too often characterize German writers, and traces broad out lines with a sure and powerful hand. His book contains a masterly criticism of the economic systems which pre ceded, or belonged to, his time, including those of Smith, Miiller, List, and the socialists. But it is interesting to us at present mainly from the general position he takes up, and his conception of the real nature of political economy. The object of his work, he tells us, is to open a way in the economic domain to a thorough historical direction and method, and to transform the science into a doctrine of the laws of the economic development of nations. It is interesting to observe that the type which he sets before him in his proposed reform of political economy is not that of historical jurisprudence, but of the science of language as it has been reconstructed in the present century, a selection which indicates the compara tive method as the one which he considered appropriate. In both sciences we have the presence of an ordered varia tion in time, and the consequent substitution of the relative for the absolute. In 1853 appeared the work of Karl Knies, entitled Die Knies. Politische Ofkonomie vom Standpunkte der geschichtlichen Methode. This is an elaborate exposition and defence of the historical method in its application to economic science, and is the most systematic and complete manifesto of the new school, at least on the logical side. The fundamental propositions are that the economic constitu tion of society at any epoch on the one hand, and on the other the contemporary theoretic conception of economic science, are results of a definite historical development ; that they are both in vital connexion with the whole social organism of the period, having grown up along with it and under the same conditions of time, place, and nationality ; that the economic system must therefore be regarded as passing through a series of phases correlative with the successive stages of civilization, and can at no point of this movement be considered to have attained an entirely definitive form ; that no more the present than any previous economic organization of society is to be regarded as absolutely good and right, but only as a phase in a continuous historical evolution ; and that in like manner the now prevalent economic doctrine is not to be viewed as complete and final, but only as representing a certain stage in the unfolding or progressive manifestation of the
truth.