[Introduction and Plan]

Once more we change our rules of procedure. The surveys presented in the three preceding Parts were indeed far from complete. But though incomplete, they aimed at conveying fairly comprehensive pictures. So far as scientific economics in the usual sense is concerned, no significant man or work or movement was left out—not intentionally, at least—and I have done what I could do within this volume to touch upon the more important framework and frontier questions. In this Part, we shall not go on with this plan. In a sense, our inquiry ends, at the foothills of the Marshall-Wicksellian mountain range, with the last glance at the classical situation around 1900. If we go on at all, it is with a different and much more restricted purpose. It seemed desirable, first, to show how the work of that period fared in our own time; ¹ second, to point out some roads that are leading away from and beyond it; and, third, to attempt diagnosis and prognosis of contemporaneous efforts. This will at best give us a bird's-eye view of just a few great contours with all the details and all the frontier districts left out. More than that, this view will have to be highly selective.