The Custodians of Real Time

Abstract

As the economics profession turned its back on real time – particularly in Britain after the 1870s – a new academic discipline emerged to carry on the task of reconstructing the past. That discipline was economic history, and its practitioners became the custodians of real time. Although economic history had its immediate academic origins in the late-nineteenth-century historicist reaction to the increasingly abstract nature of economics, it used an historical-inductive methodology that can be traced back into the ancient past. As shown in Chapter 3, while the methodological lineage of modern economic history can be traced back through the millennia, that for deductive economics can only be followed through the centuries. Hence it is wrong to suggest, as many have done, that this approach to reality is the progeny of economics and history – it is, in fact, the older sibling of both.

For longest time to him is short

(John Milton, 1671)