ABSTRACT
It has been explained in Part i that no science, in the sense there defined, is ever founded or created by a single individual or group. Nor is it in general possible to assign any precise date to its ‘birth.’ The slow process by which economics, as we now call it, rose into recognized existence ran its course between the middle of the seventeenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries. However, a concept that has been introduced in Part i may help us to be somewhat more precise, at least so far as the exigencies of exposition are concerned: the concept of Classical Situations. 1 Such a classical situation emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century and no such classical situation had ever emerged before. Availing ourselves of this, we might be tempted to start somewhere between 1750 and 1800, perhaps with the peak success of that epoch, A. Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776). But every classical situation summarizes or consolidates the work—the really original work—that leads up to it, and cannot be understood by itself. Therefore, we shall try to cover in this Part, as best we can, the whole span of more than 2000 years that extends from ‘beginnings’ to about twenty years after the publication of the Wealth of Nations. This task is much facilitated by the further fact that, so far as the purposes of this history are concerned, many centuries within that span are blanks.
