The Taming of Technics

Extract

German economic and sociological theory has always tended to follow a line of its own, away from the general Western European tendency. In the days when the English “classical” theory, incarnated in John Stuart Mill, had provided a lucid and logical complexus of interlocking “laws” for the whole of the economic activities of society, the German “Historical School,” in the person of Roscher, denied there was such a thing as economic theory at all, merely the study of actual economic facts. Against this theory (or lack of it), and against new-arisen Marxism, the “Austrian School” erected a powerful theoretical structure in defence of Capitalism. The Germans, curiously enough (in view of the industrial development of Germany), as opposed to the Austrians, always tended to react against Industrial Capitalism. Schmoller, who succeeded Roscher as the Archimandrite of the “Historical School,” preached the preservation of the handicrafts as the sole bulwark against “domination by the monied interests”; and this tradition was carried on by Max Weber (the inventor of the famous theory of the origin of Capitalism from Calvinism), and by Werner Sombart.