"The historical method exhibits itself not merely in the external form of a treatment of phenomena according to theirchronological succession,but in the following fundamental 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.)Apeople is not merely the mass of individuals now living;it will not suffice to observe contemporary facts.(3.)All the peoplesof whom we can learn anything must be studied and compared from the economic point of view,especially the ancientpeoples,whose development lies before us in its totality.(4.)We must not simply praise or blame economic institutions;fewof them have been salutary or detrimental to all peoples and at all stages of culture;rather it is a principal task of science toshow 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 Roscher's words a portion of the third alone seems open to objection;theeconomy of ancient peoples is not a more important subject of study than that of the moderns;indeed,the question of therelative importance of the two is one that ought not to be raised.For the essential condition of all sound sociological inquiryis the comparative consideration of the entire series of the most complete evolution known to historythat,namely,of thegroup of nations forming what is known as the Occidental Commonwealth,or,more briefly,"the West."The reasonsforchoosing this social series,and for provisionally restricting our studies almost altogether to it,have been stated withunanswerable force by Comte in the Philosophie Positive .Greece and Rome are,indeed,elements in the series;but it is thedevelopment as a whole,not any special portions of it,that Sociology must keep in view in order to determine the laws ofthe movement,just as,in the study of biological evolution,no one stage of an organism can be considered as ofpreponderating importance,the entire succession of changes being the object of research.Of Roscher's further eminentservices we shall speak hereafter;he is now mentioned only in relation to the origin of the new school.
In 1848Bruno Hildebrand (18121878)published the first volume of a work,which,though he lived for many years after,he never continued,entitled Die Nationalökonomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft .Hildebrand was a thinker of a really highorder;it may be doubted whether amongst German economists there has been any endowed with a more profound andsearching intellect.He is quite free from the wordiness and obscurity which too often characterise German writers,andtraces broad outlines with a sure and powerful hand.His book contains a masterly criticism of the economic systems whichpreceded,or belonged to,his time,including those of Smith,Muller,List,and the socialists.But it is interesting to us atpresent mainly from the general position he takes up,and his conception of the real nature of political economy.The objectof his work,he tells us,is to open a way in the economic domain to a thorough historical direction and method,and totransform the science into a doctrine of the laws of the economic development of nations.It is interesting to observe that thetype which he sets before him in his proposed reform of political economy is not that of historical jurisprudence,but of thescience of language as it has been reconstructed in the i9th century,a selection which indicates the comparative method asthe one which he considered appropriate.In both sciences we have the presence of an ordered variation in time,and theconsequent substitution of the relative for the absolute.
In 1853appeared the work of Karl Knies (18211898),entitled Die Politische Oekonomie von Standpunkte dergeschichtlichen Methode .This is an elaborate exposition and defence of the historical method in its application to economicscience,and is the most systematic and complete manifesto of the new school,at least on the logical side.The fundamentalpropositions are that the economic constitution of society at any epoch on the one hand,and on the other the contemporarytheoretic conception of economic science,are results of a definite historical development;that they are both in vitalconnection with the whole social organism of the period,having grown up along with it and under the same conditions oftime,place,and nationality;that the economic system must therefore be regarded as passing through a series of phasescorrelative with the successive stages of civilization,and can at no point of this movement be considered to have attained anentirely definitive form;that no more the present than any previous economic organization of society is to be regarded asabsolutely good and right,but only as a phase in a continuous historical evolution;and that in like manner the now prevalenteconomic doctrine is not to be viewed as complete and final,but only as representing a certain stage in the unfolding orprogressive manifestation of the truth.
