How Economics Forgot History : The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science

ISBN-13: 9780415257169 / Angielski / Twarda / 2001 / 448 str.

Geoffrey Martin Hodgson; G. Hodgson

Opis

Economics today has been widely criticised as being more concerned with mathematical technique than the understanding and explanation of real world phenomena. However, one hundred years ago, in Europe and America, economics was fused with the study of history and its practitioners emphasised the importance of the understanding of specific institutions. How Economics Forgot History shows how the German historical school addressed a key problem in social science and concerned themselves with the historical specific character of economic phenomena and the need to make economic theory more sensitive to the historical and geographical variety of different socio-economic systems. Examining the nature and evolution of the problem of historical specificity, it shows how this problem was tackled by the likes of Karl Marx, Gustav Schmoller, Carl Menger, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, Alfred Marshall, John Rogers Commons and Frank Knight. It is also argued that alongside Lionel Robbins, leading figures such as John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter and Talcott Parsons also helped to divert the social sciences away from this problem. Geoffrey M. Hodgson concludes with some suggestions as to how mo

O autorze

Geoffrey M. Hodgson is a Research Professor in Business Studies at the University of Hertfordshire. He has published widely in the academic journals and his previous books include Economics and Utopia (Routledge, 1999)