Abstract
DR. STARK, an economist from Czechoslovakia, has included in this volume a series of critical essays in the philosophy of political economy. His attempt to throw familiar strands of doctrine into new perspective gives his work a pleasing quality of freshness. The author's interest is moral and religious as well as economic: he disapproves of the modern tendency to cut away economics from any ethical roots and, resting it on the individual divorced from his social setting, to glorify freedom at the expense of equality. His outlook is one of hostility to the positivistic tendencies of the nineteenth century. Classical political economy of Adam Smith and his successors is considered by Dr. Stark to be superior in this respect to the modern; and he uses what he deems the greater breadth and depth of the former as touchstone to the latter. "The decision between the social and ethical approach of the classical and the individualist and scientific approach of the modern economists," he concludes, "depends upon the question whether it be desirable or even possible to divide the search for the true from the quest for the good." In his view, "the vital link between them should not be severed", since "of all creatures which we know man alone has the privilege, and the duty, to raise his face toward that Infinite Perfection, in whose image he has been formed".
The Ideal Foundations of Economic Thought
Three Essays on the Philosophy of Economics. By Dr. W. Stark. (International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction.) Pp. viii + 219. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd., 1943.) 15s. net.
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DOBB, M. The Ideal Foundations of Economic Thought. Nature 153, 236 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/153236a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/153236a0