Methodology of Classical Political Economy

Abstract

The Edinburgh's notice of Nassau Senior's Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836) pinpoints a distinction between ``ought'' (deontology) and ``is'' (ontology) which characterizes the method employed by the ``followers of Dr Smith'' down to the present. Long before Adam Smith indeed, Petty had sought to separate science, viewed as a means to an end, from moral problems which arise in the selection of ends.2 And Richard Cantillon — ``foreign'' though he was — had made ``a conscious separation of pure theory from normative policy declarations and value judgments.''3 By the end of the nineteenth century, J. N. Keynes was in a position to isolate ``a positive science … as a body of systematized knowledge concerning what is'' from either ``a normative … science as a body of systematized knowledge relating to criteria of what out to be,'' or ``an art as a system of rules for the attainment of a given end.''4 The most complete account of Petty's distinction between ``means'' and ``ends'' in social science was supplied by Lionel Robbins in the 1930s. Since ``Economics … is concerned with that aspect of behaviour which arises from the scarcity of means to achieve given ends'' it follows that ``Economics is entirely neutral between ends.''5 The argument of his book converges on a corollary of that proposition: ``Economics cannot pronounce on the validity of ultimate judgments of value.''6