History of Economic Analysis part 83. 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 782 Mill bestowed upon theory in the traditional sense and reduce correspondingly the space and thought allotted to the latter and you have Schmoller s Grundriss barring of course politico-philosophical backgrounds which do not concern us here. c The Methodenstreit. Thus the leader had sheathed the sword. More important still the flood of historism had begun to ebb and a feeling of neighborly tolerance had begun to prevail all round. Comfortably assured of the survival of both parties we may therefore turn back for a moment to consider the famous clash between theoretical and historical economists that has come down to posterity as the Battle of Methods Methodenstreit . The main facts were these. When historism was nearing high tide Carl Menger in 1883 published a book on methodology11 that dealt on a broad front with the fundamental problems of procedure in the social sciences but was very obviously intended to vindicate the rights of theoretical analysis and to put the Schmoller school in its place and a very secondary place it was 12 13 Schmoller reviewed the book unfavorably in his Jahrbuch and Menger replied in a pamphlet entitled the Errors of Historism 3 which fairly steamed with wrath and of course elicited rebuttal. This not only created a lot of bad feeling but also set running a stream of literature both of which took decades to subside. In spite of some contributions toward clarification of logical backgrounds the history of this literature is substantially a history of wasted energies which could have been put to better use. Since there cannot be any serious question either about the basic importance of historical research in a science that deals with a historical process or about the necessity of developing a set of analytic tools by which to handle the material the controversy like all such controversies might well seem to us to have been wholly pointless. This impression is strengthened by the surprising fact which .
