C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N Historical Schools of Economics: German and English Identification with “historical economics” implies a critique of prevailing orthodoxy. This reflex is as old as “modern economics”; arguments both for and against the progressive formalization of economics have gone hand in hand with either negative | CHAPTER FOURTEEN Historical Schools of Economics German and English Keith Tribe Introduction Identification with historical economics implies a critique of prevailing orthodoxy. This reflex is as old as modern economics arguments both for and against the progressive formalization of economics have gone hand in hand with either negative or positive reevaluations of the recent history of economic argument. Historical economics has developed in parallel with abstract economics can be dated from the early nineteenth century associated with the writings of Adam Muller and Friedrich List in Germany and with William Whewell and Richard Jones in Britain. In their different ways these and other writers argued that the work of Adam Smith or of David Ricardo sought a political economy founded upon economic laws that were valid for all times and all places. Political economy had become in this view in a great measure a deductive science that is certain definitions were adopted as of universal application to all countries upon the face of the globe and all classes of society and from these definitions and a few corresponding axioms was deduced a whole system of propositions which were regarded as of demonstrated validity Whewell 1859 p. x . German historical economists took a similar position but were more inclined to argue that classical economists assumed that their axioms represented the natural laws of economic life. To this was opposed the project of constructing an inductive historical science in which the diversity of economic circumstances was properly recognized. What therefore unites all those concerned with the project of a historical economics then and now is allegiance to an inductive empiricist approach to 216 K. Tribe economic theory and hostility to a deductive axiomatic economics. Historical economists are not however all of a piece quite apart from variations in their degree of understanding of and sympathy with modern economics the nature of history and