I. The Transforming of Instinctive into Conscious Impulses

Talking of these Professors, it is a curious school of economics that has lately been evolved. Nowadays, when they write their books, they call it the “Historic School.” They deal with the Mercantilists, the Physiocrats, Adam Smith, Socialism, Anarchism, and so on. And when they come to their own idea—well, that is the “Historic School.” They are more or less of this opinion: “However shall we arrive at any real thoughts as to how things should be done?” ... Truth to tell, they are helpless when they come to this. They cannot rouse in themselves a sufficient activity of thought: they cannot rise to ideas as to how we should set about it, to bring about a structure of society. To a comfortable bourgeois pedant like Lujo Brentano, or Schmeller, or Roscher, it simply does not occur to bring his thought into such activity. Their idea is: We must observe the phenomena just as the Natural Scientist does. Such a man then lets the phenomena take their course and studies them. He simply studies the historic evolution of mankind, or at most, the historic evolution of the ideas of men about their economic life. He describes what exists. The most he will do is, like Lujo Brentano—if he does not find it convenient to observe these things in his home country—to travel to a representative country of the economic life, to England, and make his investigations there. He will then describe what is the relationship of employer and employed in that country, and so forth. If there are rich people there he learns to know how they acquire credit, how Capital works. If there is poverty there, if there are those devoid of property, some of whom have more or less nothing to eat, he will describe it as the result of this or that circumstance. And at last such a man will say: After all, it is not the task of Science to show how things ought to evolve, but only to point out how they do evolve in fact.