ABSTRACT
One of the great works on the epistemology and methodology of social and economic research is Joseph Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis (1954). Although the focus of his volume is the detail of the nature and structure of economic thought from Greco-Roman times until the 1950s when he died, it is much more than an encyclopedia. Schumpeter was ringing the warning bells for the increasingly specialized nature of social and economic research that has characterized the latter half of the twentieth century. He is keen to emphasize that research is openended, that it is highly subjective, that it is prone to prejudice and that it generates discourse that may take on a life independent of the social and economic problems being investigated. He warns that there is the danger that sophisticated methods can become the tools of those seeking influence rather than knowledge and understanding. In this chapter, I seek to use the History of Economic Analysis as a launching pad to discuss recent trends in social and economic research. I shall highlight some of the comments made by Schumpeter, Descartes, Weber, Marshall, Keynes and Friedman in so far as they relate to issues concerning research practice. In doing so, however, my ultimate aim is to focus upon the application of statistical methods in the social sciences. When Schumpeter died, their use was still in infancy. However, many of the problems which he discussed are particularly relevant to this area of practice which has attracted widespread attention during the latter half of the twentieth century. The question that is central to what follows is: what meaning(s) can we attach to the results obtained from statistical investigations?
