History of Economic Analysis part 5. At the time of his death in 1950, Joseph Schumpeter-one of the major figures in economics during the first half of the 20th century-was working on his monumental History of Economic Analysis. A complete history of humankind's theoretical efforts to understand economic phenomena from ancient Greece to the present, this book is an important contribution to the history of ideas as well as to economics. | CHAPTER 1 Introduction and Plan 1. PLAN OF THE BOOK BY HISTORY of Economic Analysis I mean the history of the intellectual efforts that men have made in order to understand economic phenomena or which comes to the same thing the history of the analytic or scientific aspects of economic thought. Part II of this book will describe the history of those efforts from the earliest discernible beginnings up to and including the last two or three decades of the eighteenth century. Part III will go on through the period that may be described though only very roughly as the period of the English classics to about the early 1870 s. Part IV will present an account of the fortunes of analytic or scientific economics from speaking again very roughly the end of the classic period to the First World War though the history of some topics will for the sake of convenience be carried to the present time. These three Parts constitute the bulk of the book and embody the bulk of the research that went into it. Part V is merely a sketch of modern developments relieved of some of its cargo by the anticipations in Part IV that have been just mentioned and aims at nothing more ambitious than helping the reader to understand how modern work links up with the work of the past. In facing the huge task that has been attempted rather than performed in this book we become aware immediately of an ominous fact. Whatever the problems that to snare the unwary lurk below the surface of the history of any science its historian is in other cases at least sure enough of his subject to be able to start right away. This is not so in our case. Here the very ideas of economic analysis of intellectual effort of science are quenched in smoke and the very rules or principles that are to guide the historian s pen are open to doubt and what is worse to misunderstanding. Therefore Parts II to V will be prefaced by a Part I that is to explain as fully as space permits my views on the nature of my subject and some of
