The Economics of the Recovery Program

William Y. Elliott

American Political Science Review, 1934, vol. 28, issue 3, 410-423

Abstract: From Aristotle's day to this, the subject-matter of economics has been recognized by political scientists to affect very greatly the institutions with which the latter deal. In our own time, studies like those of Professors Charles A. Beard and Arthur N. Holcombe have carried the great bulk of American political scientists over to a primarily economic interpretation of political history. It is not too much to say that there has been some danger of political scientists conceding too much common ground to the economist's psychology and methods.The economist, on the other hand, has for some decades at least, both in this country and abroad, had scant patience with political science. He has given even less recognition to the bearing of political factors upon the simple assumptions upon which his economic science too often rested. F. Delaisi characteristically wrote of Political Myths and Economic Realities, without much regard for a test of whether the myths might not be the more powerful realities in terms of survival value. “Politics” was something which, in an annoying and “unscientific” way, occasionally interfered with the operations of man as a profit-making animal. Politics was rarely thought of as a statement of those psychological motives and controlling social institutions which corrected or conditioned at every stage the jejune motivation and the mechanical equations upon which most economic generalizations rested.

Date: 1934
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