ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The Battle of the Methods
Author: Quintanilla Carlos, Villarespe Veronica
In 1890, Alfred Marshall´s The Principles of Economics: an introductory volume was published. In the period preceding The Principles... a relevant debate between the "historic economists" and the new Austrian school took place. Adolf H. G. Wagner (1835-1917), in his comments regarding the first edition of The Principles... posits that it was not only the young Austrian school that set itself apart from the historic school, but that many German writers also distanced themselves from it; even the founders and the most representative authors of the old German historic school, such as Wilhelm G. F. Roscher (1817-1894) and Karl Knies (1821-1898) took the same stand. Wagner tells us that nobody would like to be judged according to the narrow-minded opinions of the most recent historic school, especially not by the criteria of Gustav Von Schmoller, its most representative leader. In relation with our subject, the important thing is that, to sum it up, the focus on society was based on two different conceptions from which stemmed various political theories and activities that ultimately were not conceived in order to transform reality, nor were they meant to do so. Neither were any of the methods of these schools able to find the roots of poverty. As we have seen, in the tenets of the historic school there is an underlying shoddiness pertaining to the fact that everything historic has to be analyzed using the historic theory of its own age, that is to say, a contemporary theory. As Engels tells us, man can understand monkeys when the former is more evolved than the latter, but monkeys cannot understand man. The same can be historically applied to human societies. As far as it is concerned, the Austrian school privileges mathematics and the individual, along with the law of offer and demand and the concept of final utility, albeit it omits fundamental socio-political factors: we also deem this approach to be shoddy, even if it is more sophisticated. On the subject of poverty, Schmoller posits that beside the ideas of god, of immortality, of perfection and of progress, the idea of equitableness, that which grants a fair share to each individual, is confronted by other ideas in the field of social policy.
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