The Development of Economic Doctrine: An Introductory Survey

PREFACE

CUSTOM and convention very properly require that an author—at least of anything that looks like a text-book—should make suitable apologies for his action in accentuating the horrid and outrageous disproportion between supply and demand in the world of books, and that he should at the same time, for the benefit of reviewers and others, indicate what particular long-felt gap he imagines he is filling. The object of this book is a very modest one. The most important word in its title indicates that it is an introduction, and it is of the essence of an introduction that it should represent only a beginning of knowledge. In academic study, as in social life, an introduction is no more than the first stage in the departure from a state of complete ignorance, leaving much to be learned later, not without constant possibility of surprise.

This book is accordingly designed to be used by the beginner, along with any of the innumerable text-books on economics which may be selected for the purpose of study or instruction. My own experience is that exposition of current and accepted doctrine is always made more palatable if accompanied by a backward glance at the development of thought and opinion. If it be true that the teaching of economics requires almost constant reference to the tenets of the Mercantilists, of the Physiocrats, of Smith, Malthus, List and a great cloud of other witnesses, then even a first-year student might properly have in his hands, and by his bedside, a book containing what he wants to know with regard to the development of economic doctrine. This, with all respect to other books, is the gap which this volume is designed to fill.

For, in a sense, the available books on the history of economic doctrine are too full, too comprehensive—let us say, too good—for the ordinary student, however admirably they may serve the purpose of the student who is specializing. The beginner is merely confused if he is told something about everybody, or if it is impressed upon him that Ortes and Justi call for mention. Important as they may be, Ortes and Justi can very well afford to wait. On the other hand, when the interest of the beginner is engaged, he does want a fairly complete picture; and it is educationally better that he should have a fairly adequate idea of the landmarks, even if nothing be done to temper his dark ignorance elsewhere, than that he should have a diffused and confused knowledge of a wider field.

In this book, therefore—with my eyes on the beginner—I have endeavoured so far as practicable to mention no writer unless I could find space for something like an intelligible account of what he stood for. I have accordingly proceeded by a process of selection and concentration, ruthlessly casting overboard people of quite considerable importance. Thus in dealing with the Middle Ages, I have to all intents and purposes confined the discussion to St. Thomas Aquinas; so (apart from a slight reference to Turgot) I have placed on Quesnay the entire burden of the Physiocrats. In the later period I have likewise restricted myself to those writers whom beginners are most likely to come across.

Not always have I been ruthless without a heavy heart. McCulloch and the elder Mill I have indeed neglected with unruffled feelings. Even the German historical school has gone without causing me much misgiving; somehow the old controversy with regard to “method” seems less important to-day than a generation ago, and, with this decline in significance, the leading figures in that controversy seem less insistently to require notice. But I should have liked to present Cantillon, who may yet come into his own when a promised reprint is more readily available; and patriotic motives made me hanker after John Law, who, as an economist, receives abroad a measure of respect withheld from him in his own country, where we tend to look upon him as a financial swashbuckler. So also I should have been glad to find a place for Cournot, the father of a long line of mathematical economists. But like other frail vessels, an introductory text-book also has a Plimsoll-line, and in deference to warnings regarding the dangers of foundering due to overloading, these and other precious bales have had to be left behind on the quay. As a consequence of this policy of rigorous exclusion in order to allow for fuller treatment of those included, I flatter myself that in no other book professing to be a history of economic doctrine are so many notable names entirely unmentioned.

There is evidence on all sides that the study of the development of economic doctrine is receiving to-day far more attention in English-speaking countries than was accorded to it by the last generation. I should like to think that this little book may encourage what I regard as a praiseworthy tendency, and that it may serve as a useful stepping stone to the more comprehensive works of Haney and of Gide and Rist.

ALEXANDER GRAY.

MARISCHAL COLLEGE,

ABERDEEN,

March, 1931.