French Engineers, Welfare Economics, and Public Finance in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Division of labor, in research as well as in teaching, has produced, in economics as elsewhere, an indefinite number of specialities that are usually described as “applied fields.” … These fields may accumulate “private” stocks of facts and methods that are of little or no use outside their boundaries. Beyond this, however, they have repeatedly developed accumulations of facts and conceptual schemata that should be recorded as contributions to general economic analysis, even though the appointed wardens of the latter have sometimes been slow to welcome them.—J. A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, pp. 22 and 24