Economic Sociology & Political Economy
In his monumental History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter identified four fundamental fields of economic analysis: economic history, statistics, economic theory and economic sociology. According to Schumpeter, a mastery in these four fields is “what distinguishes the ‘scientific’ economist from all the other people who think, talk, and write about economic topics” (2006: 10). (Compare to Keynes’ definition of an economist)
At the beginning of this prominent book, first published posthumously in 1954, Schumpeter briefly describes all these fields; we will however turn our intellectual attention to the section on economic sociology:
“Our three fundamental fields, economic history, statistics and statistical method, and economic theory, while essentially complementing each other, do not do so perfectly. […] It is easy to see that when we introduce the institution of private property or of free contracting or else a greater or smaller amount of government regulation, we are introducing social facts that are not…
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