History of Economic Analysis part 79. 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 742 ground that it interferes with natural selection and therefore with the progress of humanity. The reader should observe however that the almost pathetic nonsense could have been avoided and that the sound element in his argument could have been partly salvaged by adding unless methods more humane and more scientific than natural selection can be found in order to achieve what survival of the fittest is supposed to achieve. 6 It was in this period that the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas was declared to be official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church encyclical Aeterni Patris 1879 . But this only sanctioned an existing state of things and did not exert influence beyond the Catholic clergy. The vogue of Thomism among the laymen of all countries many Protestants and Jews among them that was to make him one of the most influential of modern authors dates from the twenties only. The vogue in the United States came a little later still. 7 Marx was often read vicariously in as much as the ideas of many a bourgeois intellectual hailed from him. But he was also read directly outside of the camp of orthodox socialists particularly by intellectuals without training in economics. There is a curious explanation for this. Marx is for the economist one of the most difficult authors. But it is a fact that the layman who reads him never discovers that he does not understand him. 8 Georges Sorel 1847-1922 was the author of a great many works that are held together by his antagonism toward bourgeois intellectualism although in every other respect they present a curious assortment of topics and sometimes irreconcilable views that are extremely difficult to interpret they all assert both the negative and positive implications of the anti-intellectualist principle and display in all its extent the range of economic political and cultural problems that this principle puts into new light. His temporary sympathies with revolutionary syndicalism Italian .
