motives, instead of from the Soul — of generations, Estates, and peoples — and its creative power. It looks upon men as constituent parts of situations, and knows nothing of the big personality and history-shaping will, of individuals or of groups, the will that sees in the facts of economics not ends but means. It takes economic life to be something that can be accounted for without remainder by visible causes and effects, something of which the structure is quite mechanical and completely self-contained and even, finally, something that stands in some sort of causal relation to religion and politics — these again being considered as individual self-contained domains. As this outlook is the systematic and not the historical, the timeless and universal validity of its concepts and rules is an article of faith, and its ambition is to establish the one and only correct method of applying "the" science of management. And accordingly, wherever its truths have come into contact with the facts, it has experienced a complete fiasco — as was the case with the prophecies of bourgeois theorists concerning the World War,[1] and with those of proletarian theorists on the induction of the Soviet economy.
Up to now, therefore, there has been no national economy, in the sense of a morphology of the economic side of life and more particularly of that side in the life of the high Cultures, with their formations — concordant as to stage, tempo, and duration — of economic styles. Economics has no system, but a physiognomy. To fathom the secret of its inner form, its soul, demands the physiognomic flair. To succeed in it it is necessary to be a "judge" of it as one is a "judge" of men or of horses, and requires even less " knowledge" than that which a horseman needs to have of zoölogy. But this faculty of "judgment" can be awakened, and the way to awaken it is through the sympathetic outlook on history which gives a shrewd idea of the race-instincts, which are at work in the economic as in other constituents of active existence, symbolically shaping the external position — the economic "stuff," the need — in harmony with their own inner character. All economic life is the expression of a soul-life.
This is a new, a German, outlook upon economics, an outlook from beyond all Capitalism and Socialism — both of which were products of the jejune rationality of the eighteenth century, and aimed at nothing but a material analysis and subsequent synthesis of the economic surface. All that has been taught hitherto is no more than preparatory. Economic thought, like legal,[2] stands now on the verge of its true and proper development, which (for us, as for the Hellenistic-Roman age) sets in only where art and philosophy have irrevocably passed away.
The attempt which follows is meant only as a flying survey of the possibilities here available.
