J. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis<\/a><\/div>\nTo say that the scholastics never ceased to discuss it therefore means no more than that, while interested in a great many other things, they never ceased to be interested in pure philosophy. On the whole, it may be averred that the \u2018realistic\u2019 view\u2014the view according to which only ideas or concepts, as such, have real existence, and which is therefore the exact opposite of what we should call a realistic view\u2014prevailed more or less until the fourteenth century when the battle turned in favor of the opposite, the \u2018nominalist,\u2019 view. But Abelard\u2019s (1079\u20131142) compromise seems to have enjoyed a great, though varying, amount of popularity throughout: the ideas or universals exist independently of any individuals corresponding to them in the mind of God (universalia are ante res, in this sense); but they are embodied in individual things (universalia are therefore also in rebus); and the human mind gets a glimpse of them only by observation and abstraction (in which sense they are post res).<\/p>\n
This controversy was purely epistemological in nature and has no bearing whatever upon the practice of economic or any other analysis. But it had to be mentioned because, in our own time, the Realism and Nominalism of the scholastic doctors have been linked with two other concepts, Universalism and Individualism, which are held by some writers to be relevant to analytic practice. These writers went so far as to represent Universalism and Individualism as two fundamentally different views of social processes, the conflict between which runs through the whole history of sociological and economic analysis and is indeed the essential fact behind all the other clashes of opinion that occurred throughout the ages. Whatever argument it may be possible to adduce for this doctrine from the standpoint of economic thought or, conceivably, also from the standpoint of a philosophical interpretation of analytic procedures, there is nothing in it that concerns these analytic procedures themselves: the rest of the book will establish this point. Just now we are interested merely in showing that Universalism and Individualism have nothing to do with scholastic Realism and Nominalism. <\/p>\n
Universalism as opposed to Individualism means that \u2018social collectives,\u2019 such as society, nation, church, and the like, are conceptually prior to their individual members; that the former are the really relevant entities with which the social sciences have to deal; that the latter are but the products of the former; hence that analysis must work from the collectives and not from individual behavior. If, then, we choose to call these collectives sociological universals, then the doctrine in question may indeed be said to oppose universals to individuals. But scholastic Realism opposed universals to individuals in quite a different sense. If I were to adopt scholastic Realism, then my idea of, say, society would claim logical precedence over any individual empirical society that I observe but not over individual men; the idea of these men would be another universal in the scholastic sense, claiming logical precedence over the empirical individuals.<\/p>\n
Manifestly, this would imply nothing about either the relation between the two scholastic universals or the relation between any empirical society (a universal in the sense of universalist doctrine) and the empirical individuals comprising it. In particular, I could in this case still be as strong an individualist, politically or in any other sense, as I please. The opposite opinion is thus seen to rest on nothing but an error induced by the double meaning attached to \u2018universal\u2019 and \u2018individual.\u2019 <\/p>\n
II. In surveying the history of civilizations, we sometimes speak of objective and subjective cases. By an objective civilization we mean the civilization of a society in which every individual stands in his appointed niche and is subject, without reference to his tastes, to super-individual rules; a society that recognizes as universally binding a given ethical and religious code; a society in which art is standardized and all creative activity both expresses and serves super-individual ideals. By a subjective civilization we mean a civilization that displays the opposite characteristics; in which society serves the individual and not the other way round; in short, a society that turns upon, and implements, subjective tastes and allows everyone to build his own system of cultural values. We need not enter into the general question of the analytic standing of such schemes. But we are concerned with the sweeping assertion so often met with that, in the sense explained, medieval civilization was objective and modern civilization is (or until recently was) subjective or individualist, because this touches, or may be supposed to touch, upon the \u2018spirit\u2019 in which people conducted or conduct their economic analysis. <\/p>\n
There cannot be any doubt that some of the characteristics fit \u2014 religious life in the age of \u2018One God, One Church,\u2019 as compared to religious life in the age of hundreds of denominations, is the standard example. But neither can there be any doubt that as a whole those abstract pictures are ludicrously inadequate. Is it possible to imagine a fiercer individualist than a knight? Did not the whole trouble that medieval civilization experienced with military and political management (and which largely accounts for its failures) arise precisely from this fact? And is the member of a modern labor union or the mechanized farmer of today really so much more of an individualist than was the medieval member of a craft guild or the medieval peasant? Therefore, the reader should not be shocked to learn that the individualist streak in medieval thought also was much stronger than is commonly supposed. This is true, both in the sense that opinion was much more differentiated individually and in the sense that the individual phenomenon and (in speculations about society) the individual man were much more carefully attended to than we are apt to think.<\/p>\n
Scholastic sociology and economics, in particular, are strictly individualist, if we understand this to mean that the doctors, so far as they aimed at description and explanation of economic facts, started invariably from the individual\u2019s tastes and behavior. That they applied super-individual canons of justice to these facts is not relevant to the logical nature of their analysis; but even these canons were derived from a moral schema in which the individual was an end in himself and the central idea of which was the salvation of individual souls.<\/p>\n
J. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I. In the slow and laborious task of intellectual reconstruction that had to be undertaken after centuries during which Europe had been ravaged by barbarian hordes, the remains of ancient learning natural lawly acquired paramount importance. Most of these remains were, however, not available before the twelfth century and much of the rest was beyond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[440,7207,3271,275,7896],"class_list":["post-4885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","tag-individualism","tag-nominalism","tag-realism","tag-scholasticism","tag-schumpeter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}