History of Economic Analysis part 7. 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. | History of economic analysis 22 mix techniques in a manner that differs considerably from what their chosen specialties might be thought to require a fact that we must keep in mind if we are to understand why economics is what it is. In principle however it is impossible to divorce any of the applied fields from the fundamental ones. But third such divorce is also impossible because the applied fields not only apply a stock of facts and techniques that lies ready for their use in general economics but also add to it. These fields may accumulate private stocks of facts and methods that are of little or no use outside their boundaries. Beyond this however they have repeatedly developed accumulations of facts and conceptual schemata that should be recorded as contributions to general economic analysis even though the appointed wardens of the latter have sometimes been slow to welcome them. Modern agricultural economics affords some examples the fields of transportation and public finance afford others. It follows that we cannot confine ourselves to the history of general economic analysis but shall have to keep an eye on developments in applied fields as best we can. CHAPTER 3 Interlude II Contemporaneous Developments in Other Sciences FROM TIME TO TIME we shall look up from our work in order to view a piece of intellectual scenery. Slightly less perfunctorily we shall for every one of our periods register some contemporaneous developments in other sciences in our sense of the term that were relevant or might for one reason or another be expected to have been relevant to the development of our own. What has to be said now about this aspect of our exposition is so preponderantly concerned with philosophy that I might as well have entitled this chapter Economics and Philosophy. The rest will be disposed of in the two paragraphs that follow. 1. ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY After what has been said in the preceding chapter about the paramount importance for economic analysis .
