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298 Economics
nomics and micro-economics is now feasible; and it has become easier to pass
from one term or concept to a parallel or rival term or concept. But despite all
this, it still seems we must wait several decades for that ‘generalized political
economy’ postulated by Merleau-Ponty (Les aventures de la dialectique) and
Perroux, and of which capitalism and socialism were to be but two special aspects.
C. Economic history andpraxiology
I. It would not be practicable to consider in detail here the controversial ques-
tion of the subject-matter and scope of political economy and its relationship
with the other social disciplines. Instead, two completely opposite views will be
presented in broad outline and an attempt will then be made to determine which
(if indeed either) seems best confirmed by the development of the social sciences
and best in line with economic realities during the last few decades.
The following are these two views, which seem mutually exclusive.
‘Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship
between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’.z3 This definition
by Lionel Robbins, already quoted, can be complemented as follows from von
Mises: ‘Out of the political economy of the classical school emerges the general
theory of human action. .. no treatment of economic problems proper can avoid
starting from acts of choice. Economics becomes a part, although hitherto the
best elaborated part, of a more universal science - praxiol0gy’.~4 The purpose of
economic science, so conceived, is to formulate rules of behaviour which, deriv-
ed by deduction from the principle of economic rationality, are entirely a-social
and a-historical. They refer with equal validity to Robinson Crusoe, ship-
wrecked and struggling for survival on an uninhabited island, and to the capi-
talist entrepreneur. A theory of economic activity as formal as this belongs like
logic or mathematics to the realm of a priori knowledge and is therefore not
subject to empirical verification, either statistical or historical. A science SO
conceived is of course no longer a social science whose purpose is to study ob-
jective reality. This approach to the subject-matter of economics found its ad-
herents among the extreme individualists, who rejected any idea of handling
economic phenomena in aggregate categories. They not only carried to extremes
the a-historicism of the English classical economists but also refuted their theo-
ry, since the classical economists endeavoured to study the national economy
as a whole.
Now for the opposite view. Pointing out that it is most difficult to separate the
subject-matter and tasks of economic history from those of political economy,
Witold Kula writes: ‘In our opinion, the respective subjects of economic history
and of economics are identical. Because the nature of the subject determines
the research methods, the fundamental stock of methods employed by economic
history must be provided by the methods of economics, the methods of studying
economic phenomena, the economic aspect of human actions and their economic
effects’.Zs Kula is inclined to reduce the difference between economic history and
theoretical economics simply to the practical differences in the professional