Methodology of Classical Political Economy

Abstract

The Edinburgh’s notice of Nassau Senior’s Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836) pinpoints a distinction between “ought” (deontology) and “is” (ontology) which characterizes the method employed by the “followers of Dr Smith” down to the present. Long before Adam Smith indeed, Petty had sought to separate science, viewed as a means to an end, from moral problems which arise in the selection of ends.² And Richard Cantillon — “foreign” though he was — had made “a conscious separation of pure theory from normative policy declarations and value judgments.”³ By the end of the nineteenth century, J. N. Keynes was in a position to isolate “a positive science … as a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is” from either “a normative … science as a body of systematized knowledge relating to criteria of what out to be,” or “an art as a system of rules for the attainment of a given end.”⁴ The most complete account of Petty’s distinction between “means” and “ends” in social science was supplied by Lionel Robbins in the 1930s. Since “Economics … is concerned with that aspect of behaviour which arises from the scarcity of means to achieve given ends” it follows that “Economics is entirely neutral between ends.”⁵ The argument of his book converges on a corollary of that proposition: “Economics cannot pronounce on the validity of ultimate judgments of value.”⁶