WEBVTT NOTE Introduction 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.000 Economic Thought Before Adam Smith, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume 1, by Murray R. Rothbard 2 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:16.000 INTRODUCTION 3 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:31.000 As the subtitle declares, this work is an overall history of economic thought from a frankly Austrian standpoint, that is, from the point of view of an adherent of the Austrian School of Economics. 4 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:44.000 This is the only such work by a modern Austrian. Indeed, only a few monographs in specialized areas of the history of thought have been published by Austrians in recent decades. 5 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:58.000 Not only that, this perspective is grounded in what is currently the least fashionable, though not the least numerous, variant of the Austrian School, the Misesian or praxeologic. 6 00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:04.000 But the Austrian nature of this work is scarcely its only singularity. 7 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:10.720 When the present author first began studying economics in the 1940s, there was an overwhelmingly 8 00:01:10.720 --> 00:01:17.880 dominant paradigm in the approach to the history of economic thought, one that is still paramount, 9 00:01:17.880 --> 00:01:20.840 though not as boldly as in that era. 10 00:01:20.840 --> 00:01:26.760 Essentially, this paradigm features a few great men as the essence of the history of 11 00:01:26.760 --> 00:01:33.200 economic thought, with Adam Smith as the almost superhuman founder. 12 00:01:33.200 --> 00:01:39.520 But if Smith was the creator of both economic analysis and of the free-trade, free-market 13 00:01:39.520 --> 00:01:46.120 tradition in political economy, it would be petty and niggling to question seriously any 14 00:01:46.120 --> 00:01:49.600 aspect of his alleged achievement. 15 00:01:49.600 --> 00:01:57.840 Any sharp criticism of Smith as either economist or free-market advocate would seem only anachronistic, 16 00:01:57.840 --> 00:02:03.320 Looking down upon the pioneering founder from the point of view of the superior knowledge 17 00:02:03.320 --> 00:02:11.320 of today, puny descendants unfairly bashing the giants on whose shoulders we stand. 18 00:02:11.320 --> 00:02:18.600 If Adam Smith created economics, much as Athena sprang full-grown and fully armed from the 19 00:02:18.600 --> 00:02:26.060 brow of Zeus, then his predecessors must be foils, little men, of no account. 20 00:02:26.060 --> 00:02:32.940 And so short shrift was given in these classic portrayals of economic thought to anyone unlucky 21 00:02:32.940 --> 00:02:36.300 enough to precede Smith. 22 00:02:36.300 --> 00:02:42.080 Generally they were grouped into two categories and brusquely dismissed. 23 00:02:42.080 --> 00:02:48.560 Immediately preceding Smith were the mercantilists, whom he strongly criticized. 24 00:02:48.560 --> 00:02:53.500 Mercantilists were apparently boobs who kept urging people to accumulate money but not 25 00:02:53.500 --> 00:03:01.660 not to spend it, or insisting that the balance of trade must balance with each country. 26 00:03:01.660 --> 00:03:07.580 Scholastics were dismissed even more rudely as moralistic medieval ignoramuses who kept 27 00:03:07.580 --> 00:03:16.140 warning that the just price must cover a merchant's cost of production plus a reasonable profit. 28 00:03:16.140 --> 00:03:23.340 The classic works in the history of thought of the 1930s and 1940s then proceeded to expound 29 00:03:23.340 --> 00:03:29.420 and largely to celebrate a few peak figures after Smith. 30 00:03:29.420 --> 00:03:35.660 Ricardo systematized Smith and dominated economics until the 1870s. 31 00:03:35.660 --> 00:03:42.740 Then the marginalists, Jevons, Menger and Valra, marginally corrected Smith-Ricardo 32 00:03:42.740 --> 00:03:49.340 classical economics by stressing the importance of the marginal unit as compared to whole 33 00:03:49.340 --> 00:03:52.040 classes of goods. 34 00:03:52.040 --> 00:03:58.040 And it was on to Alfred Marshall, who sagely integrated Ricardian cost theory with the 35 00:03:58.040 --> 00:04:07.360 supposedly one-sided Austrian-Giovonian emphasis on demand and utility, to create modern neoclassical 36 00:04:07.360 --> 00:04:09.680 economics. 37 00:04:09.680 --> 00:04:15.240 Karl Marx could scarcely be ignored, and so he was treated in a chapter as an aberrant 38 00:04:15.240 --> 00:04:17.200 Ricardian. 39 00:04:17.200 --> 00:04:24.000 And so the historian could polish off his story by dealing with four or five great figures, 40 00:04:24.000 --> 00:04:29.500 each of whom, with the exception of Marx, contributed more building blocks toward the 41 00:04:29.500 --> 00:04:37.500 unbroken progress of economic science, essentially a story of ever onward and upward into the 42 00:04:37.500 --> 00:04:38.980 light. 43 00:04:38.980 --> 00:04:44.920 In the post-World War II years, Keynes, of course, was added to the pantheon, providing 44 00:04:44.920 --> 00:04:50.320 a new culminating chapter in the progress and development of the science. 45 00:04:50.320 --> 00:04:57.240 Keynes, beloved student of the great marshal, realized that the old man had left out what 46 00:04:57.240 --> 00:05:04.080 would later be called macroeconomics in his exclusive emphasis on the micro. 47 00:05:04.080 --> 00:05:10.960 And so Keynes added macro, concentrating on the study and explanation of unemployment, 48 00:05:10.960 --> 00:05:16.640 a phenomenon which everyone before Keynes had unaccountably left out of the economic 49 00:05:16.640 --> 00:05:25.160 picture, or had conveniently swept under the rug by blithely assuming full employment. 50 00:05:25.160 --> 00:05:31.060 Since then, the dominant paradigm has been largely sustained, although matters have recently 51 00:05:31.060 --> 00:05:33.360 become rather cloudy. 52 00:05:33.360 --> 00:05:40.880 For one thing, this kind of great man-ever-upward history requires occasional new final chapters. 53 00:05:40.880 --> 00:05:48.720 Keynes' General Theory, published in 1936, is now almost 60 years old. 54 00:05:48.720 --> 00:05:52.880 Surely there must be a great man for a final chapter? 55 00:05:52.880 --> 00:05:54.320 But who? 56 00:05:54.320 --> 00:06:00.440 For a while Schumpeter, with his modern and seemingly realistic stress on innovation, 57 00:06:00.440 --> 00:06:01.680 had a run. 58 00:06:01.680 --> 00:06:07.040 But this trend came a cropper, perhaps on the realization that Schumpeter's fundamental 59 00:06:07.040 --> 00:06:13.880 General Work, or Vision, as he himself perceptively put it, was written more than two decades 60 00:06:13.880 --> 00:06:16.820 before the General Theory. 61 00:06:16.820 --> 00:06:22.520 The years since the 1950s have been murky, and it is difficult to force a return to the 62 00:06:22.520 --> 00:06:29.920 once forgotten Valra into the Procrustian bed of continual progress. 63 00:06:29.920 --> 00:06:36.160 My own view of the grave deficiency of the few-great-men approach has been greatly influenced 64 00:06:36.160 --> 00:06:40.760 by the work of two splendid historians of thought. 65 00:06:40.760 --> 00:06:47.180 One is my own dissertation mentor, Joseph Dorfman, whose unparalleled multi-volume work 66 00:06:47.180 --> 00:06:54.200 on the history of American economic thought demonstrated conclusively how important allegedly 67 00:06:54.200 --> 00:06:59.000 lesser figures are in any movement of ideas. 68 00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:05.480 In the first place, the stuff of history is left out by omitting these figures, and history 69 00:07:05.480 --> 00:07:11.760 The theory is therefore falsified by selecting and worrying over a few scattered texts to 70 00:07:11.760 --> 00:07:14.520 constitute the history of thought. 71 00:07:14.520 --> 00:07:20.920 Second, a large number of the supposedly secondary figures contributed a great deal 72 00:07:20.920 --> 00:07:26.640 to the development of thought, in some ways more than the few peak thinkers. 73 00:07:26.640 --> 00:07:33.160 Hence, important features of economic thought get omitted and the developed theory is made 74 00:07:33.160 --> 00:07:37.080 Paltry and barren as well as lifeless. 75 00:07:37.080 --> 00:07:45.080 Furthermore, the cut and thrust of history itself, the context of the ideas and movements, 76 00:07:45.080 --> 00:07:52.400 how people influenced each other and how they reacted to and against one another, is necessarily 77 00:07:52.400 --> 00:07:56.640 left out of the few great men approach. 78 00:07:56.640 --> 00:08:02.960 This aspect of the historian's work was particularly brought home to me by Quentin Skinner's notable 79 00:08:02.960 --> 00:08:21.600 The Continual Progress Onward and Upward Approach was demolished for me, and should have been 80 00:08:21.600 --> 00:08:28.520 for everyone, by Thomas Kuhn's famed Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 81 00:08:28.520 --> 00:08:34.660 Kuhn paid no attention to economics, but instead, in the standard manner of philosophers and 82 00:08:34.660 --> 00:08:44.340 historians of science, focused on such ineluctably hard sciences as physics, chemistry and astronomy. 83 00:08:44.340 --> 00:08:49.920 Bringing the word paradigm into intellectual discourse, Kuhn demolished what I like to 84 00:08:49.920 --> 00:08:54.480 call the Hwig Theory of the History of Science. 85 00:08:54.480 --> 00:09:01.520 The Whig Theory, subscribed to by almost all historians of science, including economics, 86 00:09:01.520 --> 00:09:08.560 is that scientific thought progresses patiently, one year after another, developing, sifting 87 00:09:08.560 --> 00:09:16.920 and testing theories, so that science marches onward and upward each year, decade or generation, 88 00:09:16.920 --> 00:09:22.920 learning more and possessing ever more correct scientific theories. 89 00:09:22.920 --> 00:09:28.980 An analogy with the Whig Theory of History, coined in mid-19th century England, which 90 00:09:28.980 --> 00:09:35.620 maintained that things are always getting, and therefore must get, better and better. 91 00:09:35.620 --> 00:09:42.760 The Whig Historian of Science, seemingly on firmer grounds than the regular Whig Historian, 92 00:09:42.760 --> 00:09:50.040 implicitly or explicitly asserts that later is always better in any particular scientific 93 00:09:50.040 --> 00:09:51.660 discipline. 94 00:09:51.660 --> 00:09:58.060 The Huyg historian, whether of science or of history proper, really maintains that for 95 00:09:58.060 --> 00:10:05.780 any point of historical time, whatever was, was right, or at least better than whatever 96 00:10:05.780 --> 00:10:08.100 was earlier. 97 00:10:08.100 --> 00:10:14.700 The inevitable result is a complacent and infuriating Panglossian optimism. 98 00:10:14.700 --> 00:10:21.080 In the historiography of economic thought, the consequence is the firm if implicit position 99 00:10:21.080 --> 00:10:27.920 that every individual economist, or at least every school of economists, contributed their 100 00:10:27.920 --> 00:10:32.600 important might to the inexorable upward march. 101 00:10:32.600 --> 00:10:40.360 There can then be no such thing as gross systemic error that deeply flawed or even invalidated 102 00:10:40.360 --> 00:10:46.920 an entire school of economic thought, much less sent the world of economics permanently 103 00:10:46.920 --> 00:10:48.400 astray. 104 00:10:48.400 --> 00:10:55.080 Kuhn, however, shocked the philosophic world by demonstrating that this is simply not the 105 00:10:55.080 --> 00:10:58.300 way that science has developed. 106 00:10:58.300 --> 00:11:05.120 Once a central paradigm is selected, there is no testing or sifting, and tests of basic 107 00:11:05.120 --> 00:11:12.200 assumptions only take place after a series of failures and anomalies in the ruling paradigm 108 00:11:12.200 --> 00:11:17.140 has plunged the science into a crisis situation. 109 00:11:17.140 --> 00:11:24.300 One need not adopt Kuhn's nihilistic philosophic outlook, his implication that no one paradigm 110 00:11:24.300 --> 00:11:32.140 is or can be better than any other, to realize that his less-than-starry-eyed view of science 111 00:11:32.140 --> 00:11:37.860 rings true, both as history and as sociology. 112 00:11:37.860 --> 00:11:45.020 But if the standard Romantic or Panglossian view does not work, even in the hard sciences, 113 00:11:45.020 --> 00:11:52.220 A fortiori, it must be totally off the mark in such a soft science as economics, in a 114 00:11:52.220 --> 00:11:59.220 discipline where there can be no laboratory testing, and where numerous, even softer disciplines 115 00:11:59.220 --> 00:12:07.220 such as politics, religion and ethics necessarily impinge on one's economic outlook. 116 00:12:07.220 --> 00:12:13.460 There can, therefore, be no presumption whatever in economics that later thought is better 117 00:12:13.460 --> 00:12:20.060 Better than Earlier, or even that all well-known economists have contributed their sturdy might 118 00:12:20.060 --> 00:12:22.580 to the developing discipline. 119 00:12:22.580 --> 00:12:28.540 For it becomes very likely that rather than everyone contributing to an ever-progressing 120 00:12:28.540 --> 00:12:37.020 edifice, economics can and has proceeded in contentious, even zigzag fashion, with later 121 00:12:37.020 --> 00:12:44.420 and inter-systemic fallacy sometimes elbowing aside earlier but sounder paradigms, thereby 122 00:12:44.420 --> 00:12:51.980 redirecting economic thought down a totally erroneous or even tragic path. 123 00:12:51.980 --> 00:13:00.140 The overall path of economics may be up or it may be down over any given time period. 124 00:13:00.140 --> 00:13:06.900 In recent years, economics under the dominant influence of formalism, positivism and econometrics 125 00:13:06.900 --> 00:13:12.900 Science and preening itself on being a hard science has displayed little interest in its 126 00:13:12.900 --> 00:13:14.720 own past. 127 00:13:14.720 --> 00:13:21.160 It has been intent, as in any real science, on the latest textbook or journal article 128 00:13:21.160 --> 00:13:24.900 rather than on exploring its own history. 129 00:13:24.900 --> 00:13:32.920 After all, do contemporary physicists spend much time pouring over 18th century optics? 130 00:13:32.920 --> 00:13:39.400 In the last decade or two, however, the reigning Walrassian-Keynesian neoclassical formalist 131 00:13:39.400 --> 00:13:47.140 paradigm has been called ever more into question, and a veritable Kuhnian crisis situation has 132 00:13:47.140 --> 00:13:54.460 developed in various areas of economics, including worry over its methodology. 133 00:13:54.460 --> 00:14:00.720 Amidst this situation, the study of the history of thought has made a significant comeback, 134 00:14:00.720 --> 00:14:05.720 in which we hope and expect will expand in coming years. 135 00:14:05.720 --> 00:14:12.720 For if knowledge buried in paradigms lost can disappear and be forgotten over time, 136 00:14:12.720 --> 00:14:19.440 then studying older economists and schools of thought need not be done merely for antiquarian 137 00:14:19.440 --> 00:14:26.280 purposes or to examine how intellectual life proceeded in the past. 138 00:14:26.280 --> 00:14:32.240 Their economists can be studied for their important contributions to forgotten and therefore 139 00:14:32.240 --> 00:14:35.840 new knowledge today. 140 00:14:35.840 --> 00:14:41.640 Valuable truths can be learned about the content of economics not only from the latest journals 141 00:14:41.640 --> 00:14:46.480 but from the texts of long-deceased economic thinkers. 142 00:14:46.480 --> 00:14:53.520 But these are merely methodological generalizations, the concrete realization that important economic 143 00:14:53.520 --> 00:14:59.920 knowledge had been lost over time came to me from absorbing the great revision of the 144 00:14:59.920 --> 00:15:08.240 scholastics that developed in the 1950s and 1960s. The pioneering revision came dramatically 145 00:15:08.240 --> 00:15:14.000 in Schumpeter's great History of Economic Analysis and was developed in the works of 146 00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:21.120 Raymond de Rouvet, Marjorie Grice Hutchinson and John T. Noonan. It turns out that the 147 00:15:21.120 --> 00:15:27.520 The Scholastics were not simply medieval, but began in the 13th century and expanded 148 00:15:27.520 --> 00:15:32.880 and flourished through the 16th and into the 17th century. 149 00:15:32.880 --> 00:15:39.040 Far from being cost of production moralists, the Scholastics believed that the just price 150 00:15:39.040 --> 00:15:45.320 was whatever price was established on the common estimate of the free market. 151 00:15:45.320 --> 00:15:52.880 Not only that, far from being naive labor or cost of production value theorists, the scholastics 152 00:15:52.880 --> 00:15:59.320 may be considered proto-Austrians, with a sophisticated subjective utility theory of 153 00:15:59.320 --> 00:16:01.800 value and price. 154 00:16:01.800 --> 00:16:08.480 Furthermore, some of the scholastics were far superior to current formalist microeconomics 155 00:16:08.480 --> 00:16:14.200 in developing a proto-Austrian dynamic theory of entrepreneurship. 156 00:16:14.200 --> 00:16:39.200 Moreover, in macro, the scholastics, beginning with Bourdain and culminating in the 16th century Spanish scholastics, worked out an Austrian rather than monetarist supply and demand theory of money and prices, including inter-regional money flows and even a purchasing power parity theory of exchange rates. 157 00:16:39.200 --> 00:17:00.200 It seems to be no accident that this dramatic revision of our knowledge of the scholastics was brought to American economists not generally esteemed for their depth of knowledge of Latin by European-trained economists steeped in Latin, the language in which the scholastics wrote. 158 00:17:00.200 --> 00:17:06.200 This simple point emphasizes another reason for loss of knowledge in the modern world, 159 00:17:06.200 --> 00:17:13.200 the insularity in one's own language, particularly severe in the English speaking countries, 160 00:17:13.200 --> 00:17:20.200 that has, since the Reformation, ruptured the once Europe-wide community of scholars. 161 00:17:20.200 --> 00:17:35.200 One reason why continental economic thought has often exerted minimal, or at least delayed, influence in England and the United States is simply because these works had not been translated into English. 162 00:17:35.200 --> 00:17:49.200 For me, the impact of scholastic revisionism was complemented and strengthened by the work during the same decades of the German-born Austrian historian, Emil Couter. 163 00:17:49.200 --> 00:18:00.640 Kauder revealed that the dominant economic thought in France and Italy during the 17th and especially the 18th centuries was also Proto-Austrian, 164 00:18:00.640 --> 00:18:07.760 emphasizing subjective utility and relative scarcity as the determinants of value. 165 00:18:07.760 --> 00:18:14.480 From this groundwork, Kauder proceeded to a startling insight into the role of Adam Smith, 166 00:18:14.480 --> 00:18:21.760 That, however, follows directly from his own work and that of the scholastic revisionists. 167 00:18:21.760 --> 00:18:28.000 That Smith, far from being the founder of economics, was virtually the reverse. 168 00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:35.680 On the contrary, Smith actually took the sound and almost fully developed proto-Austrian subjective 169 00:18:35.680 --> 00:18:43.760 value tradition and tragically shunted economics onto a false path, a dead end from which the 170 00:18:43.760 --> 00:18:49.080 The Austrians had to rescue economics a century later. 171 00:18:49.080 --> 00:18:55.560 Instead of subjective value, entrepreneurship and emphasis on real market pricing and market 172 00:18:55.560 --> 00:19:02.560 activity, Smith dropped all this and replaced it with a labor theory of value and a dominant 173 00:19:02.560 --> 00:19:10.360 focus on the unchanging long-run natural price equilibrium, a world where entrepreneurship 174 00:19:10.360 --> 00:19:18.200 was assumed out of existence. Under Ricardo, this unfortunate shift in focus was intensified 175 00:19:18.200 --> 00:19:26.220 and systematized. If Smith was not the creator of economic theory, neither was he the founder 176 00:19:26.220 --> 00:19:32.940 of laissez-faire and political economy. Not only were the scholastics analysts of and 177 00:19:32.940 --> 00:19:39.080 believers in the free market and critics of government intervention, but the French and 178 00:19:39.080 --> 00:19:44.740 and Italian economists of the 18th century were even more laissez-faire oriented than 179 00:19:44.740 --> 00:19:51.840 Smith who introduced numerous waffles and qualifications into what had been in the hands 180 00:19:51.840 --> 00:19:58.180 of Turgot and others an almost pure championing of laissez-faire. 181 00:19:58.180 --> 00:20:04.380 It turns out that rather than someone who should be venerated as creator of modern economics 182 00:20:04.380 --> 00:20:11.820 or of laissez-faire, Smith was closer to the picture portrayed by Paul Douglas in the 1926 183 00:20:11.820 --> 00:20:19.860 Chicago Commemoration of the Wealth of Nations, a necessary precursor of Karl Marx. 184 00:20:19.860 --> 00:20:25.980 Amel Couter's contribution was not limited to his portrayal of Adam Smith as the destroyer 185 00:20:25.980 --> 00:20:33.300 of a previously sound tradition of economic theory, as the founder of an enormous zag 186 00:20:33.300 --> 00:20:39.060 in a Kuhnian picture of a zigzag history of economic thought. 187 00:20:39.060 --> 00:20:45.060 Also fascinating, if more speculative, was Couter's estimate of the essential cause of 188 00:20:45.060 --> 00:20:51.420 a curious asymmetry in the course of economic thought in different countries. 189 00:20:51.420 --> 00:20:57.420 Why is it, for example, that the subjective utility tradition flourished on the continent, 190 00:20:57.420 --> 00:21:04.920 especially in France and Italy, and then revived particularly in Austria, whereas the labor 191 00:21:04.920 --> 00:21:11.040 and cost of production theories developed especially in Great Britain. 192 00:21:11.040 --> 00:21:15.960 Cowder attributed the difference to the profound influence of religion. 193 00:21:15.960 --> 00:21:23.700 The scholastics and then France, Italy and Austria were Catholic countries, and Catholicism 194 00:21:23.700 --> 00:21:31.300 emphasized consumption as the goal of production, and consumer utility and enjoyment as, at 195 00:21:31.300 --> 00:21:36.420 least in moderation, valuable activities and goals. 196 00:21:36.420 --> 00:21:42.820 The British tradition, on the contrary, beginning with Smith himself, was Calvinist, and reflected 197 00:21:42.820 --> 00:21:50.380 the Calvinist emphasis on hard work and labor toil as not only good, but a great good in 198 00:21:50.380 --> 00:21:58.020 in itself, whereas consumer enjoyment is, at best, a necessary evil, a mere requisite 199 00:21:58.020 --> 00:22:02.540 to continuing labor and production. 200 00:22:02.540 --> 00:22:07.900 On reading Cowder, I considered this view a challenging insight, but essentially an 201 00:22:07.900 --> 00:22:09.980 unproven speculation. 202 00:22:09.980 --> 00:22:16.620 However, as I continued studying economic thought and embarked on writing these volumes, 203 00:22:16.620 --> 00:22:23.700 I concluded that Couter was being confirmed many times over. Even though Smith was a moderate 204 00:22:23.700 --> 00:22:29.740 Calvinist, he was a staunch one, nevertheless, and I came to the conclusion that the Calvinist 205 00:22:29.740 --> 00:22:37.620 emphasis could account, for example, for Smith's otherwise puzzling championing of usury laws, 206 00:22:37.620 --> 00:22:43.540 as well as his shift in emphasis from the capricious, luxury-loving consumer as the 207 00:22:43.540 --> 00:22:52.540 and the determinant of value, to the virtuous laborer embedding his hours of toil into the value of his material product. 208 00:22:52.540 --> 00:23:02.540 But if Smith could be accounted for by Calvinism, what of the Spanish-Portuguese Jew-turned-Quaker David Ricardo? 209 00:23:02.540 --> 00:23:04.540 Surely no Calvinist. 210 00:23:04.540 --> 00:23:11.020 Here, it seems to me that recent research into the dominant role of James Mill as mentor 211 00:23:11.020 --> 00:23:18.460 of Ricardo and major founder of the Ricardian system comes strongly into play. 212 00:23:18.460 --> 00:23:25.220 For Mill was a Scotsman, ordained as a Presbyterian minister, and steeped in Calvinism. 213 00:23:25.220 --> 00:23:31.580 The fact that, later in life, Mill moved to London and became an agnostic had no effect 214 00:23:31.580 --> 00:23:37.900 on the Calvinist nature of Mill's basic attitudes toward life and the world. 215 00:23:37.900 --> 00:23:44.060 Mill's enormous evangelical energy, his crusading for social betterment, and his devotion to 216 00:23:44.060 --> 00:23:51.820 labor toil, as well as the cognate Calvinist virtue of thrift, reflected his lifelong Calvinist 217 00:23:51.820 --> 00:23:53.980 world outlook. 218 00:23:53.980 --> 00:24:00.940 John Stuart Mill's resurrection of Ricardianism may be interpreted as his filio-pietist devotion 219 00:24:00.940 --> 00:24:06.740 to the memory of his dominant father, and Alfred Marshall's trivialization of Austrian 220 00:24:06.740 --> 00:24:14.780 insights into his own neo-Ricardian schema also came from a highly moralistic and evangelical 221 00:24:14.780 --> 00:24:16.780 neo-Calvinist. 222 00:24:16.780 --> 00:24:24.220 Conversely, it is no accident that the Austrian School, the major challenge to the Smith-Ricardo 223 00:24:24.220 --> 00:24:30.420 and also vision, arose in a country that was not only solidly Catholic, but whose values 224 00:24:30.420 --> 00:24:36.980 and attitudes were still heavily influenced by Aristotelian and Thomist thought. 225 00:24:36.980 --> 00:24:43.300 The German precursors of the Austrian School flourished not in Protestant and anti-Catholic 226 00:24:43.300 --> 00:24:49.380 Prussia, but in those German states that were either Catholic or were politically allied 227 00:24:49.380 --> 00:24:53.180 to Austria, rather than Prussia. 228 00:24:53.180 --> 00:24:59.280 The result of these researches was my growing conviction that leaving out religious outlook, 229 00:24:59.280 --> 00:25:05.420 as well as social and political philosophy, would disastrously skew any picture of the 230 00:25:05.420 --> 00:25:08.320 history of economic thought. 231 00:25:08.320 --> 00:25:14.340 This is fairly obvious for the centuries before the 19th, but it is true for that century 232 00:25:14.340 --> 00:25:21.700 as well, even as the technical apparatus takes on more of a life of its own. 233 00:25:21.700 --> 00:25:26.980 In consequence of these insights, these volumes are very different from the norm, and not 234 00:25:26.980 --> 00:25:34.260 just in presenting an Austrian rather than a neo-classical or institutionalist perspective. 235 00:25:34.260 --> 00:25:40.220 The entire work is much longer than most, since it insists on bringing in all the lesser 236 00:25:40.220 --> 00:25:46.300 figures and their interactions, as well as emphasizing the importance of their religious 237 00:25:46.300 --> 00:25:53.180 and Social Philosophies, as well as their narrower, strictly economic views. 238 00:25:53.180 --> 00:25:57.920 But I would hope that the length and inclusion of other elements does not make this work 239 00:25:57.920 --> 00:25:59.720 less readable. 240 00:25:59.720 --> 00:26:06.560 On the contrary, history necessarily means narrative, discussion of real persons as well 241 00:26:06.560 --> 00:26:14.060 as their abstract theories, and includes triumphs, tragedies and conflicts, conflicts which are 242 00:26:14.060 --> 00:26:18.260 are often moral, as well as purely theoretical. 243 00:26:18.260 --> 00:26:24.340 Hence I hope that for the reader, the unwanted length will be offset by the inclusion of 244 00:26:24.340 --> 00:26:31.460 far more human drama than is usually offered in histories of economic thought. 245 00:26:31.460 --> 00:26:34.700 Murray N. Rothbard, Las Vegas, Nevada.