The Pseudo-Science of Economics

Extract

The philosophers of the eighteenth century created a study of the social order in its economic aspect. The fruit of their researches was developed in the nineteenth century under the name of Political Economy, which was included among the sciences. Precisely to what extent, if any, there is an ‘economic science’ is a topic worthy of examination; and by the publication of M. Vialatoux’s Philosophic Economique many suggestive lines of thought are presented.

The mental background of the founders of economics— Stewart, Petty, Locke, Adam Smith in England, and the Physiocrats in France—was the work principally of Bacon and Descartes. The former asserted the value of inductive logic in the formation of sciences, thereby following Aristotle (whose work it was his ambition to consummate); he formulated a new abstraction of the sciences, based on the method of knowing, not on the object known (thereby deserting Aristotle and founding the peculiar heresy of English philosophy).