Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. DEFINITION OF THE FIELD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. 7. From what was said in the last chapter it will be seen that Political Economy treats of human desires, and the laws and conditions of their gratification under the circumstances in which men actually find themselves. But the field of human desires is by no means all included in Political Economy. Confusion of ideas often arises from not considering the limits of the subject. We therefore point out certain branches of thought which, though sometimes confounded with Political Economy, do not belong to it. There is a wide field of investigation included under the general term Sociology, or the science of society. The consideration of human desires in some of their aspects belongs to this field. Although the subjects treated of under the general head of Sociology all run -into each other by insensible gradations, yet in that principal branch of the subject growing out of human desires we may recognize at least three divisions. Firstly, we may inquire how human desires originate, and how they are modified by the circumstances which surround the individual. Among these circumstances are his ancestry, his education, the community which surrounds him, and the government and institutions under which he lives. But this inquiry into the origin and growth of human desires is qnite distinct from Political Economy. The latter takes the man up, ready-made as it were, and has nothing to do with the question how he got to be what he is. The reason for this distinction may be seen at once by reflecting that the laws which control the formation of character are distinct from those which determine the acts of men after their characters are formed, and therefore must not be confounded with them. Secondly, we mny analyze the de...
Synopsis
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