Economic Doctrine and Method

IV

THE HISTORICAL SCHOOL AND THE THEORY OF MARGINAL UTILITY

 

1. The more we approach modern times the less possible it becomes to characterize briefly the wealth of currents and crosscurrents and the more untrue, forced and misleading appears any systematic arrangement and grouping. The slogans used to designate certain outstanding groups are much simpler than is warranted by the actual conditions. These slogans, moveover, are partly coloured by non-scientific factors—in which case we find widely different scientific efforts thrown together—and finally they appear with a claim to universal validity, while in fact in every branch of the social sciences, and often even with different problems in the same branch, conditions are different. We must ...