as Schmoller thought, from historical data, must appear just as absurd, in their view, as the effort to establish laws of historical development, such as Kurt Breysig, for example, attempted to discover.
In Max Weber’s view also, economics and sociology completely merge into history. Like the latter, they are moral or cultural sciences and make use of the same logical method. Their most important conceptual tool is the ideal type, which possesses the same logical structure in history and in what Max Weber regarded as economics and sociology. But bestowing on ideal types names like “economic style,” “economic system,” or “economic stage” in no way changes their logical status. They still remain the conceptual instrument of historical, and not of theoretical, investigation. The delineation of the characteristic features of a historical period and the understanding of its significance, which ideal types make possible, are indisputably tasks of the historical sciences. The very expression “economic style” is an imitation of the jargon and conceptual apparatus of art history. Thus far, however, no one has thought of calling art history a theoretical science because it classifies the historical data with which it deals into types or “styles” of art.
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Moreover, these distinctions among art styles are based on a systematic classification of works of art undertaken in accordance with the methods of the natural sciences. The method that leads to the differentiation of art styles is not the specific understanding of the moral sciences, but the systematic division of objects of art into classes. Understanding makes reference only to the results of this work of systematizing and schematizing. In the distinctions among economic styles these conditions are lacking. The result of economic activity is always want-satisfaction, which can be judged only subjectively. An economic style does not make its appearance in the form of artifacts that could be classified in the same way as works of art. Economic styles cannot be distinguished, for example, according to the characteristics of the goods produced in the various periods of economic history, as the Gothic style and the Renaissance style are differentiated according to the characteristics of their architecture. Attempts to differentiate economic styles according to economic attitude, economic spirit, and the like, do violence to the facts. They are based not on objectively distinguishable, and therefore rationally incontrovertible, characteristics, but on understanding, which is inseparable from subjective judgment of qualities.
Furthermore, everyone would find it completely absurd if an art historian were to presume to derive laws of style for the art of the present and the future from the relationships discovered among the styles of the past. Yet this is precisely what the adherents of the Historical School presume to do with the economic laws that they purport to discover from the study of history. Even if one were to grant that it is possible to empirically derive laws of economic action applicable within temporal, national, or otherwise delimited historical periods, from the data of economic history, it would still be impermissible to call these laws economics and to treat them as such. No matter how much views about the character and content of economics may differ, there is one point about which unanimity prevails: economics is a theory capable of making assertions about future economic action, about the economic conditions of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. The concept of theory, in contradistinction to the concept of history, is, and always and universally has been, understood as involving a regularity valid for the future as well as the past.
If the adherents of the Historical School were, in accordance with the logic and epistemology of their program, to confine themselves to
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speaking only of the economic conditions of the past, and if they were to decline to consider any questions touching on the economic conditions of the future, they could at least spare themselves the reproach of inconsistency. However, they maintain that what they write about and deal with is economics. Moreover, they engage in discussions of economic policy from the standpoint of scientific theory, as if their science, as they themselves conceive it, were in a position to make predictions about the economic conditions of the future.
We are not concerned here with the problems dealt with in the debate over the permissibility of value judgments in science. What is at issue is rather the question whether an adherent of the Historical School has not debarred himself from participating in the discussion of purely scientific problems, apart from all questions concerning the desirability of the ultimate ends being aimed at: whether, for example, he may make predictions about the future effects of a proposed change in currency legislation. Art historians speak of the art and the styles of the past. If they were to undertake to speak of the paintings of the future, no painter would pay any attention to what they said. Yet the economists of the Historical School talk more about the future than about the past. (As far as the historian is concerned, there are fundamentally only the past and the future. The present is but a fleeting instant between the two.) They speak of the effects of free trade and protection and of the consequences of the formation of cartels. They tell us that we must expect a planned economy, autarky, and the like. Has an art historian ever presumed to tell us what art styles the future holds in store for us?
The consistent adherent of the Historical School would have to confine himself to saying: There are, to be sure, a small number of generalizations that apply to all economic conditions.5 But they are so few and insignificant that it is not worth while to dwell on them. The only worthy objects of consideration are the characteristics of changing economic styles that can be ascertained from economic history, and the historical theories relevant to these styles. Science is able to make statements about such matters. But it should be silent about economic conditions in general, and therefore about the economic conditions of tomorrow. For there cannot be an “historical theory” of future economic conditions.
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If one classifies economics as one of the moral sciences that make use of the method of historical “understanding,” then one must also adopt the procedure of these sciences. One may, accordingly, write a history of the German economy, or of all economies thus far, in the same way as one writes a history of German literature or of world literature; but one may certainly not write a “universal economics.” Yet even this would be possible, from the point of view of the Historical School, if one were to contrast “universal economics,” understood as universal economic history, to an alleged “special economics” that would deal with individual branches of production. However, the standpoint of the Historical School does not permit economics to be differentiated from economic history.
The purpose of this book is to establish the logical legitimacy of the science that has for its object the universally valid laws of human action, i.e., laws that claim validity without respect to the place, time, race, nationality, or class of the actor. The aim of these investigations is not to draw up the program of a new science, but to show what the science with which we are already acquainted has in view. The area of thought encompassed here is one to which Windelband, Rickert, and Max Weber were strangers. However, if they had been familiar with it, they would certainly not have disputed its logical legitimacy. What is denied is the possibility of deriving a posteriori from historical experience empirical laws of history in general, or of economic history in particular, or “laws” of “economic action” within a definite historical period.
Consequently, it would be completely amiss to want to read into the results of these investigations a condemnation of theories which assign to the moral or cultural sciences that make use of the historical method the cognition of the historical, the unique, the nonrepeatable, the individual, and the irrational, and which consider historical understanding as the distinctive method of these sciences and the construction of ideal types as their most important conceptual instrument. The method employed by the moral and cultural sciences is not in question here. On the contrary, my criticism is leveled only against the impermissible confusion of methods and the conceptual vagueness involved in the assumption—which abandons the insights that we owe to the inquiries of Windelband, Rickert, and Max Weber—that it is possible to derive “theoretical” knowledge
