History of Economic Analysis part 13. 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 82 this doctrine from the standpoint of economic thought or conceivably also from the standpoint of a philosophical interpretation of analytic procedures there is nothing in it that concerns these analytic procedures themselves the rest of the book will establish this point. Just now we are interested merely in showing that Universalism and Individualism have nothing to do with scholastic Realism and Nominalism. Universalism as opposed to Individualism means that social collectives such as society nation church and the like are conceptually prior to their individual members that the former are the really relevant entities with which the social sciences have to deal that the latter are but the products of the former hence that analysis must work from the collectives and not from individual behavior. If then we choose to call these collectives sociological universals then the doctrine in question may indeed be said to oppose universals to individuals. But scholastic Realism opposed universals to individuals in quite a different sense. If I were to adopt scholastic Realism then my idea of say society would claim logical precedence over any individual empirical society that I observe but not over individual men the idea of these men would be another universal in the scholastic sense claiming logical precedence over the empirical individuals. Manifestly this would imply nothing about either the relation between the two scholastic universals or the relation between any empirical society a universal in the sense of universalist doctrine and the empirical individuals comprising it. In particular I could in this case still be as strong an individualist politically or in any other sense as I please. The opposite opinion is thus seen to rest on nothing but an error induced by the double meaning attached to universal and individual. 5 II. In surveying the history of civilizations we sometimes speak of objective and subjective cases. By an objective
