ON THE SCIENCE OF ECONOMICS AND ITS RELATION TO FREE EXCHANGE AND SOCIALISM.
ALL persons who are interested in the so-called science of Economics know only too well the melancholy and deplorable state into which it has fallen. It is such a chaos of contradictions that very many persons refuse to believe that there is any such science at all 1.
The cause of this lamentable confusion is that there are fundamental concepts of it, which are wholly irreconcileable with each other, just as there have been in the earlier and imperfect stages of most other sciences, such as astronomy, optics, and many others.
A science is a body of phenomena all relating to a single fundamental general concept. Thus dynamics is the science which treats of the laws governing the phenomena of force; optics is the science of the laws governing the phenomena of
In 1870 Stanley Jevons, after having read my works then published, as he has very handsomely acknowledged in his preface, spoke of Political Economy as the shattered science-an expression which has acquired a certain popular vogue. Long previous to this, in 1856, when I had occasion to study the works on Economics then current in their relation to credit and banking, I had pointed out their defects, and said, in the Introduction
to Vol. II of my Theory and Practice of Banking: 'We have no hesitation in saying that the whole system of Political Economy, as laid down by Ricardo and developed by Mr. John Stuart Mill, is utterly and radically bad'-which gave prodigious offence at the time. I also said: "The time has come when all Political Economy must be rewritten,' After thirty. eight years people are beginning to find out that this is true.