Publications of the University of Pennsylvania Volume 11; Series in Political Economy and Public Law (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. THE ECONOMY OF THE PHYSIOCRATS. "In the sense in which I use the term, the first economy was created by the physiocrats in France. They lived in an age when the physical sciences engrossed the attention of all scholars. The materialistic ideas coming from these sciences dominated all thinkers, and tended to make them look upon man as the mere outcome of the mechanical forces that acted upon him. It is not strange therefore that when men saturated with these ideas, began the study of industrial affairs, they should seek to erect an economic science modeled after the physical sciences. In the history of the theory of economics nothing is more marked than the dominant influence of the ideas which its investigators bring with them from the sciences they have previously studied. We have not only a physical conception of economic science, but also a moral, a mathematical, an historical, and we shall have many other like conceptions of the science as men with different education and new ideas are attracted from other fields of investigation into the study of social affairs. It is also difficult to see how a beginning in economic theory could have been made by any other class of thinkers, or how any economy could have preceded that of the physiocrats. By the ordinary thinkers of that age social and mental phenomena were regarded as outside of the realm of law. Such men have been opponents of all mental sciences until they were forced to give up their opposition on account of the success of these sciences in the hands of those who believed in the universal reign of law. When these scientists began to look for laws in the industrial world the most obvious of them were the physical laws that operate from without upon men and society, and determine the trend of industrial progres...