Abstract
We are experiencing a situation of increasing criticism of the state in which economics is being represented nowadays. One of the remarks is that economics has become too formalized and too abstract and that the state of discipline has become increasingly unable to express many phenomena of “real life” with its concrete socioeconomic manifestations. Criticism has found a way to get cumulated in different terms of economic pluralism. The claim for fostering interdisciplinary research, which we also find nowadays, reflects the diagnosis that our islands of shared knowledge have become too fragmented. When reflecting what is going on in recent times, a view back to the end of the nineteenth century may help to contextualize recent debate. Looking at the debate between Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller, which was later classified as the first battles in social sciences, helps to sort up arguments which are still on the agenda, inductive versus deductive methods or empirism versus abstract theorizing.
Bögenhold, Dieter. Economics, Sociology, History: Notes on Their Loss of Unity, Their Need for Re-Integration and the Current Relevance of the Controversy between Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller, in: Forum for Social Economics, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2008, pp. 85–101.
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Notes
- 1.
For reasons that cannot be discussed in detail here, Max Weber became much more widely known during the second half of the twentieth century than Werner Sombart. Even today there are still rich discussions about Max Weber’s work and aspects of his biography (for a small selection, see Collins (1986), Kalberg (1994), Käsler (1995) and Swedberg (1998)). Secondary literature on Sombart has also grown in recent years (Backhaus 1996), but there is still no English translation of his principal work, “Der moderne Kapitalismus” in spite of Dorfman’s reasoned complaints about this (1959). “The lack of an English translation and the tremendous length of the work (three thousand pages) no doubt prevented a widespread knowledge of the work except at secondhand. Sombart attempted, as the subtitle suggests, ‘an historical and systematic exposition of Europe’s economic life from its beginning to the present day’. His approach was similar to that of Max Weber but with far less emphasis on the role of religious institutions. It was theoretical, nor in the sense of classical economics, but in the effort to supply detailed facts and documentation in support of his preconceived notions of evolutionary economic behavior. … Despite sharp criticisms of Sombart’s work, particularly as to the validity of its detailed facts and the twisting of these facts to fit the author’s preconceptions, many of his conclusions were thought to be the result of brilliant insight. His analysis of a mature capitalist economy was notable. More than any other thinker, Sombart was responsible for the general option of the term ‘capitalism’ as a description of the modern individual or corporate business economy. As a result of his work the stigma that had attached to the term from radical literature was largely wiped out” (Dorfman, Vol. IV, 1959, p. 182, 183).
- 2.
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930). Talcott Parsons added a short preface to it. The article was then republished in the Weber volume edited by Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (1993). Recently Protestant Ethics has been newly published with a substantial introduction by Randall Collins (1998).
- 3.
The fact that the question is actually much older and was dealt with by English empiricists in the eighteenth century is overlooked. Schmoller, who among other things left behind a plurality of works on widely differing topics, was a most influential and important person in academic life in Germany at the zenith of his life. After his death in 1917, however, Schmoller’ s influence seemed to have declined considerably.
- 4.
A number of similar developments is outlined in the UNESCO “World Social Science Report” (1999).
- 5.
Albert (2004) shows some principles of academic competition and progress which illustrate that scientific progress has never one final and exclusive ultima ratio.
- 6.
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Bögenhold, D. (2021). Economics, Sociology, History: Notes on Their Loss of Unity, Their Need for Re-Integration, and the Current Relevance of the Controversy between Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller. In: Neglected Links in Economics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79193-3_11
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