Abstract
It is not the first time that economic science finds itself in difficulty. It was in difficulty when interventionist theories and policies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seemed to have outlived their usefulness; when the physiocrats proved their case against intervention only by assuming that industry was unproductive; when Adam Smith corrected that mistake but left a legacy of unresolved problems; when Ricardo tried but failed to produce a clear and logically faultless theory of value and distribution; when J. S. Mill attempted to draw socialist rabbits out of purely Liberal silk hats; when Marx tried to prove the inevitability of the proletarian revolution through the science of political economy; when Marshall saw nearly all the basic faults of neo-classical economics but did not make them sufficiently explicit; when Keynes argued his case against hoarding so well as to undermine the significance of long-term accumulation.
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Notes And References
See further, Guy Routh, The Origin of Economic Ideas (London: Macmillan, 1975) chap. 1, and
H. Katouzian, Ideology and Method in Economics (London: Macmillan, and New York: New York University Press, 1980) chap. 2.
See further, Elizabeth Johnson, ‘John Maynard Keynes: Scientist or Politician?’ in Joan Robinson (ed.), After Keynes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973) pp. 12–25,
R. F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (London: Macmillan, 1952); Katouzian, Ideology and Method, chap. 6, and ‘The Hallmarks of Scholasticism and Science’, forthcoming in Richard Whitley et al. (eds), The Yearbook of the Sociology of Sciences (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1982).
Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London. Macmillan, 1961) Appendix D, p. 645.
See R. L. Smyth (ed.), Essays in Economic Method (London: Duckworth, 1962) p. 44.
See Smyth, Essays; J. M. Keynes, The Scope and Method of Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1891);
J. A. Schumpeter, Economic Doctrine and Method (first German edition, 1912) (London: Oxford University Press, 1954);
L. von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics (1933) (New York: Van Nostrand, 1960);
L. C. R. Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London: Macmillan, 1933);
F. A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution of Science (Evanston, Ill.: Free Press, 1952);
M. Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
See further, T. W. Hutchison The Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) (New York: Kelly, 1965), whose argument, not for historical relativism, but against the universalism of Liberal economics is one of the earliest of its kind.
See Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx — Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978) p. 13.
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© 1983 The British Association for the Advancement of Science
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Katouzian, H. (1983). Towards the Progress of Economic Knowledge. In: Wiseman, J. (eds) Beyond Positive Economics?. British Association for the Advancement of Science. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16992-4_5
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