Page:The Decline of the West.pdf/962



standpoint from which to comprehend the economic history of great Cultures is not to be looked for on economic ground. Economic thought and action are a side of life that acquires a false appearance when regarded as a self-contatned kind of life. Least of all is the secure standpoint to be had on the basis of the present-day world-economics, which for the last 150 years has been mounting fantastically, perilously, and in the end almost desperately — an economics, moreover, that is exclusively Western-dynamic, anything but common-human.

That which we call national economy to-day is built up on premisses that are openly and specifically English. The industry of machines, which is unknown to all other Cultures, stands in the centre as though it were a matter of course and, without men being conscious of the fact, completely dominates the formulation of ideas and the deduction of so-called laws. Credit-money, in the special form imparted to it by the relations of world-trade and export-industry in a peasantless England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like capital, value, price, property — and the definitions are then transferred without more ado to other Culture-stages and Iife-cycles. The insular position of England has determined a conception of politics, and of its relation to economics, that rules in all economic theories. The creators of this economic picture were David Hume and Adam Smith. Everything that has since been written about them or against them always presupposes the critical structure and methods of their systems. This is as true of Carey and List as it is of Fourier and Lassalle. As for Smith’s greatest adversary, Marx, it matters little how loudly one protests against English capitalism when one is thoroughly imbued with its images, the protest is itself a recognition, and its only aim is: through a new kind of accounting, to confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects.

From Adam Smith to Marx it is nothing but self-analysis of the economic thinking of a single Culture on a particular development-level. Rationalistic through and through, it starts from Material and its conditions, needs, and