Why German historicists were wrong to put John Stuart through the Mill

Philippe Gillig ()

Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg

Abstract: Many German historical economists have denounced classical political economy’s pretension to establish abstract universal laws. This paper seeks to defend John Stuart Mill against this criticism. It argues that, contrary to what these authors alleged, they have a great deal more in common with Mill on this topic than they were willing to realise. In fact, from a methodological as well as a political perspective, their views on relativity regarding both economic laws and the laissez-faire principle are very similar to those of Mill’s..

Keywords: German historical economics; H. Roesler; G. Schmoller; J. S. Mill; natural laws; epistemology; laissez-faire. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B12 B15 B40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://beta.u-strasbg.fr/WP/2016/2016-43.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2016-43

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).