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VIII - Particular polities: political economy and the historical method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2009

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Summary

Every branch of the philosophy of society, morals and political economy not excepted, needs investigation and development by historical induction; and … not only the moral and economic condition of society, but its moral and economic theories and ideas, are the results of the course of national history and the state of national culture.

t. e. cliffe leslie, Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy (1879)

If we are to have a body of doctrine which lays down maxims in regard to the pursuit of wealth, this body of doctrine can only be a Political Economy, not a cosmopolitan Economic Science, for it must devote its attention to the particular needs and ambitions of a particular polity, and can only indicate the means to procure wealth-as-conceived and wealth-as-desired by that nation at that time, not wealth in general.

william cunningham, Politics and Economics (1885)

we Englishmen pass on the continent as masters of the art of government; yet it may be doubted whether, even among us, the science, which corresponds to that art, is not very much in the condition of political economy before Adam Smith took it in hand.’

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That Noble Science of Politics
A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History
, pp. 247 - 276
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1983

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