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ECONOMIC THOUGHT
by
Carmelo
Ferlito
March-July 2014
HISTORY OF
ECONOMIC THOUGHT
Lecturer:
Carmelo Ferlito
Verona, Italy, 1978
carmelo.ferlito@gmail.com
carmeloferlito.wordpress.com
https://newinti.academia.edu/CarmeloFerlito
LESSON 1
-
ECONOMICS
AND
HISTORY OF ECONOMICS
References:
1. A. Roncaglia (2005) [2001], The Wealth of Ideas. A History of
Economic Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
Chapter 1.
2. C. Ferlito (2013), Phoenix Economics. From Crisis to Renascence,
New York, Nova Publishers, pp. 1-9.
3. L. Robbins (2000) [1998], A History of Economic Thought. The
LSE Lectures, Princeton, Princeton University Press, pp. 5-10.
WHAT IS ECONOMICS?
A discipline, a region of the world of thought, should seek to know itself. Like an
individual human being, it has received from its origins to stamp of character, to native
mode of response to the situations confronting it. Right responses, responsibility, will
require of the profession as of the individual an insight into the powers and defects of
the tool which history has bequeathed to it. (G.L.S. Shackle).
Today most economists have given up questioning the purposes and the means of their
scientific work, seeking refuge on a second line: algebraic analysis of functional
relationships. Economics has become econometrics. The result is the formulation of
economic theories that are apparently exact but nevertheless not true. Not everything
that can be proven mathematically is also logically valid.
WHAT IS ECONOMICS?
Today economists believe that the method of natural sciences, founded
precisely on the discovery of universally valid functional relationships, can
be applied to economics. This is the result of relegating the question of
methodology to a kind of scientific itching for minor intellectuals and
meticulous scholars with a mania for philosophy..
But The knowledge is universal, when it manages to give us the meaning
of things, before whose magnitude and whose eternity, all that is pathos and
tendency among men disappears: when it leads us to the primordial and
cosmic, to what in the field of the spirit has the same characters of purity
and power as the oceans, deserts and glaciers. (J. Evola).
WHAT IS ECONOMICS?
Every economic theory can be only part of a more general gnoseological
awareness.
The social process is really one whole indivisible. Out of its great stream the
classifying hand of the investigator artificially extracts economic facts. The
designation of a fact as economic already involves an abstraction, the first of many
forced upon us by the technical conditions of mentally copying reality. A fact is
never exclusively or purely economic; other and often more important aspects
always exist. Nevertheless, we speak of economic facts in science just as in
ordinary life, and with the same right; with the same right, too, with which we may
write a history of literature even though the literature of a people is inseparably
connected with all the other elements of its existence. (J.A. Schumpeter).