Abstract
This paper analyzes a debate that occurred in the 1870’s as a consequence of the challenge that two historicist economists - Thomas Cliffe Leslie and John Ingram - posed to the deductive, abstract and universal nature of Political Economy. The aim of these economists was to replace the deductive science of Political Economy with an inductive and historical science. Walter Bagehot and William Stanley Jevons - representing respectively the prevailing orthodoxy and the emergent marginalism - reacted directly to these critics. Bagehot’s answer was to reaffirm the deductive method of Political Economy, and to restrict its validity to advanced commercial societies such as England. Jevons’s reaction was to emphasize the deductive and universalist character of economic science, but also defend the necessity to develop historical and applied branches of economic investigation. It is argued that the historicist challenge placed methodological questions in the ‘order of the day’ of economic discussions, and led Bagehot and Jevons to ascribe a ‘place’ to history - even if not the one aspired by Leslie and Ingram. The analysis of this debate helps us to better understand the alternatives that existed for Economics in the late nineteenth-century, and might shed light on the direction that our science followed in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Keywords:
Historicism; Cliffe Leslie; John Ingram; Walter Bagehot; Stanley Jevons