Note 118 — Chapter XXII · HOW FAR WEALTH IS THE BASIS OF OPEN CLASSES
Reading edition
If the reader cares to know my opinion of that doctrine—sometimes called the economic interpretation of history—which teaches that economic conditions are in a peculiar sense the primary and determining factor in society, he will find it in the following passages:
“The organic view of history [which I hold] denies that any factor or factors are more ultimate than others. Indeed it denies that the so-called factors—such as the mind, the various institutions, the physical environment and so on—have any real existence apart from a total life in which all share in the same way that the members of the body share in the life of the animal organism. It looks upon mind and matter, soil, climate, flora, fauna, thought, language and institutions as aspects of a single rounded whole, one total growth. We may concentrate attention upon some one of these things, but this concentration should never go so far as to overlook the subordination of each to the whole, or to conceive one as precedent to others.”
“I cannot see that the getting of food, or whatever else the economic activities may be defined to be, is any more the logical basis of existence than the ideal activities. It is true that there could be no ideas and institutions without a food supply; but no more could we get food if we did not have ideas and institutions. All work together, and each of the principal functions is essential to every other.”
“History is not like a tangled skein which you may straighten out by getting hold of the right end and following it with sufficient persistence. It has no straightness, no merely lineal continuity, in its nature. It is a living thing, to be known by sharing its life, very much as you know a person. In the organic world—that is to say in real life—each function is a centre from which causes radiate and to which they converge; all is alike cause and effect; there is no logical primacy, no independent variable, no place where the thread begins. As in the fable of the belly and the members, each is dependent upon all the others. You must see the whole or you do not truly see anything.” (Publications of the American Economic Association, Third Series, vol. v, 426 ff.)