scholarly journals Carl Menger on the theory of economic history. Reflections from Bulgaria

2014 ◽  
Vol 61 (6) ◽  
pp. 723-738
Author(s):  
Pencho Penchev

Carl Menger founded the Austrian School of economics at the end of the 19th century. He rejected some of the main ideas of the German Historical School in his work Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics (1881). The submitted paper presents the main implications of the investigations on the theory of economic history with a special reference to the economic history and history of economic thought of the Balkans. The emphasis is on the methodological subjectivism, spontaneous order, rejection of the teleological understanding of the process of economic development, and the application of mathematical models. These principles could be used as a theoretical base of the historical research, though they are widely underestimated in modern economic history.

Author(s):  
John Toye

The 2008 financial crisis has sparked student demands to rewrite the economics curriculum, giving more space to economic history and the history of economic thought. This can be done within a survey of the main narratives of socioeconomic development. Pre-18th-century discussions of improvement were narratives of linear social progress, however. Once the moderns triumphed over the ancients, the term ‘development’ became common in English. The alternative ‘civilization’ proved to be too ambiguous and too controversial. The development concept bifurcated into ‘organic and constructive versions’, the first with passive (evolutionary) and the latter with active (policy) implications. All development narratives stem from one or the other of these two strands.


2002 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 268-269
Author(s):  
Larry Neal

Economic historians usually have to explain to their economist colleagues the difference between economic history, which focuses on facts, and history of economic thought, which focuses on ideas. Our colleagues in finance departments, typically fascinated by episodes in financial history treated by economic historians, are bound to be disappointed in the lack of attention given to the development of ideas in finance by historians of economic thought. Geoffrey Poitras, a professor of finance at Simon Fraser University, makes a valiant effort to remedy these oversights in his collection of vignettes that highlight the sophistication of financial instruments and analysts of financial markets well before the time of Adam Smith. Starting in 1478 with the publication of the Treviso Arithmetic, a typical textbook of commercial arithmetic for Italian merchants, and ending with brief snippets from the Wealth of Nations, Poitras treats the reader to a fascinating potpourri of excerpts from various manuals, brief biographies of pioneers in financial analysis, and historical discursions on foreign-exchange and stock markets.


Author(s):  
Kurt Dopfer

AbstractEconomic History and History of Economic Thought haven been relegated increasingly from the teaching and research curricula of economics in recent years. The paper starts off arguing that this trend is due to the mechanistic ontology of mainstream economics, and it continues setting out an alternative evolutionary ontology expounding how the historical element must and can be integrated into the body of economic theory. Centre stage is a lingua franca composed of analytical terms that are designed to bridge the domains of theoretical and of historical economic analysis. Economists are viewed in their status as observers whose cognitive dispositions as well as social behaviour co-evolve with the environment they inhabit. Further advances in economic theory are seen as being critically dependent on employing an evolutionary approach and on establishing a communication link to economic history and the history of economic thought which likewise may get essential inspirations from applying that approach.


1947 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph A. Schumpeter

Economic historians and economic theorists can make an interesting and socially valuable journey together, if they will. It would be an investigation into the sadly neglected area of economic change.As anyone familiar with the history of economic thought will immediately recognize, practically all the economists of the nineteenth century and many of the twentieth have believed uncritically that all that is needed to explain a given historical development is to indicate conditioning or causal factors, such as an increase in population or the supply of capital. But this is sufficient only in the rarest of cases.


2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-128
Author(s):  
Emma Rothschild

The article suggests that The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution can be the point of departure for a new economic history that combines the history of economic thought, economic-cultural history, especially of long-distance connections, and the history of ordinary exchanges in economic life.


1932 ◽  
Vol 42 (165) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
J. R. Hicks ◽  
D. M. Goodfellow

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