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Article: Economics as humanism.
- Article from:
- First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life
- Article date:
- October 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Institute on Religion and Public Life. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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For more than a century now economics has been advanced and practiced as a science, on the model of physics and mathematics. It was not always so. From Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 until well after the publication of John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy in 1848, economics was viewed as a branch of moral philosophy astonishingly under-developed by earlier philosophers. It seems hardly possible, yet it is true, that before the time of Adam Smith no classic author -- not Aristotle, not Aquinas, not Bacon nor Descartes -- had asked about the cause of the wealth of nations in any sustained and fruitful was. ...