内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HISTORY OF ECONOMICS CHAPTER I ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN GREECE The Greeks had no conception of political economy as a science. They did, however, busy themselves with certain facts and data that constitute the material of this science, namely, with the production and distribution of wealth. They raised crops, breeded cattle, extracted the precious metals, traded with one another and with foreign nations; but they did all this without having any established formulae or principles, and without any sight of those tendencies that constitute the laws of political economy. One of the reasons of this would arise from the nature of the subject itself. The phenomena that make up the material of political economy seem vague and indeterminate. Only after much patient reflection does it become apparent that what seemed to be so many heaps of facts are really produced and regulated by constant and undeviating influences. The Greek mind, therefore, especially in its infancy, would naturally shrink from striving to reduce to the condition of a science such indefinite and apparently inappropriate material. Moreover, even if the material of political economy had seemed all that could be desired, the Greek mind itself had not received the necessary previous training.It was still in an infantile condition. It was ruled chiefly by instinct and imagination. The habit of careful observation and of the use of deduction and induction, so necessary for constructing a science, was at first wanting. It is not surprising, therefore, that, owing to the apparent want of adequate material, and the deficiency of any previous scientific training, the Greek mind should have failed to construct a science of political economy. And yet the ancient Greeks had some theories regarding the production and ...