History of Economic Analysis part 57. 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 522 belonged to the middle class and lived in the mid-Victorian But there is besides much pure ideology also something behind those recommendations that is analytic in nature and admits of the application of a scientific method. Only this scientific method is not the one we might expect. Mill s problem is not to explain historically and sociologically the origin and the various forms of the institution of inheritance. This as he said in so many words in the case of the institution of property p 2 of Book II ch. 1 is no concern of social philosophy. What does concern the latter is the problem of social expediency though not the expediency of any institution as it actually is but as a community that is unhampered by any tradition or prejudice might introduce it under advice I suppose of the social philosopher. This is perhaps not the most scientific way of putting the matter but it indicates Mill s method of analyzing social institutions clearly enough expediency of an institution turns upon its effect on or role in the economic organism in practice upon the effects to be expected from given changes of a given pattern and these effects Mill then proceeded to analyze. In doing so this fighter against prejudice proves himself indeed the most defenseless victim of prejudice against anything that is very far removed from his own mode of life or thought displaying in this a deplorable narrowness of outlook8 but in themselves both the task and the method are scientific analytic in nature. b The State in Classic Economics. In Chapter 2 of this Part we learned a number of facts about the politics of the period s economists and about the meaning and limitations of what has been called the System of Natural Liberty. In Chapter 3 we made the acquaintance of several types of political sociology among them the Marxist Theory of the State. In Chapter 4 we had the opportunity to notice here and there the positions taken by individual economists .
