ABSTRACT
The dialectic juxtaposition of quality and quantity, of uniqueness and repetition, of abstract theory and of concrete description, has from far back been the leitmotiv of the running methodological controversy in social science. The nineteenth-century Continental, particularly the German, philosophic tradition supplied the general background for the first stages of this discussion. In economics the issue was originally raised in the full-dress attack mounted in the third quarter of the last century by the so-called German historical school against the then dominant classical theory. It is not surprising that such antitheoretical orientation found no prominent adherents among economists in England, although among the English historians it was quite recently most eloquently espoused by so prominent a scholar as Collingwood.
