Introduction

The first section of the present essay has the character of a generic introduction and bears witness to Einaudi's combination of the inductive and deductive methods. ¹ but the part that in many ways best illuminates Einaudi's intentions and his endeavour to build up his arguments and keep together the diverse issues that led to this essay is the second section. Since I will focus on these issues a number of times in the following pages, it is worth reading the full section:

if economic science consisted only in considering abstract problems and demonstrating similarly abstract laws, it would hardly benefit from even that minimal following among the lay public it does still enjoy, and it would not exert the least influence on human affairs, not even that infinitesimal trace which it can indeed boast. Following and influence are due to the connections scholars and the lay public believe to exist between abstract schemata and concrete reality, or which are held to link problems and first approximation theorems with the problems and the associated urgent solutions in the daily life of human society. Physicists, chemists and astronomers can, if they so desire, spend their entire life without the slightest concern for the concrete applications others will draw from the theorems they, as scientists, have discovered. Not so for the economist. No economist has ever stayed rigidly closed up in the ivory tower of first principles, first approximation theorems. Pantaleoni and Pareto, to mention but two of the celebrated economists of the past generation, were combative fighters in the debate centering on the everyday problems of their time just as much as they were great theoreticians. The attitude they adopted in facing the battles of real life repeatedly molded their manner of addressing theoretical problems. To be sure, they took immense care to distinguish a theorem from counsels; they endeavored to avoid any contamination between the one and the other; sometimes both men — especially one of the two (Pareto) — spoke scornfully and ironically of literary economists who mistook science for politics, giving counsels to princes instead of declaring uniformities. Yet by dint of fine distinctions and 2clarifications, they never ceased to reproach, criticize, contemptuously belittle — and only very seldom did they deign to praise — governors and the governed, pointing out which path was best avoided and which was the right one to take. It is a fact that in economic sciences, there exists a field of theorems, properly speaking, and a field of counsels: but these two fields are not separate and independent of each other. Economists who do have something to say, even though sometimes delighting in contemptuously belittling the other and perhaps better part of themselves, cultivate the land for the purpose of knowledge and dig the land over for the purpose of acting upon reality; the imitators, the servile pen-pushers, incapable of perceiving the links between the two aspects of the whole person, construct insipid theory and supply the counsels they know will find favor with the powerful.