History of Economic Analysis part 22. 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 172 interest a conception that recalls Justi s and was quite out of contact with England s humor. But this should not weigh with us. In the second place when one surveys as the reader should the five books into which the work is divided Population Trade and Industry Money and Coins Credit and Debts and Taxes one cannot fail to be struck by the number of points that indicate more originality and deeper thought than does the Wealth of Nations but also by the number of definite mistakes and infelicitous formulations. In the theories of population prices money and taxation Steuart went much below the smooth surface on which happily sailed his course. But only in the first of these did he make a significant contribution which will be discussed below in Chapter 5 in the others it is a hard job to get the wheat out of unpromising chaff or even in some instances to be quite sure that there is any wheat at all. d High Level of the Italian Contribution. But the honors of the field of pre-Smithian system production should go to the eighteenth-century Italians. In intent scope and plan their works were in the tradition that has been illustrated by the examples of Carafa and Justi they were systems of Political Economy in the sense of welfare economics the old scholastic Public Good and the specifically utilitarian Happiness meeting in their concept of welfare felicita pubblica . But whereas in zeal for fact-finding and in grasp of practical problems they were not inferior to the Germans they were superior to most of their Spanish English and French contemporaries in analytic power and achievement. Most of them were professors and civil servants and wrote from the standpoint of professors and civil servants. The regionalism of Italian life10 divides them into groups. But I can discern only two schools in the strict sense of the term which implies both personal contact and similarity of doctrine due to mutual influence the Neapolitan and the
