ABSTRACT
For over a century and a half, from David Hume to Gustav Cassel, the defenders of the market economy were able to draw intellectual strength no less than moral comfort from the existence of a body of economic thought which supported their cause and which appeared to show that interference with the free play of market forces would, at least in the long run, do more harm than good and prove ultimately self-defeating. During this period an attitude favourable to ‘interventionism’ almost invariably went together with an attitude critical of the doctrines of classical economics. In the Methodenstreit, Schmoller appears to have felt that what his opponents were really defending was not so much a methodological point of view as the principle of the market economy – ‘Das Manchestertum’.
