This classic study — one of the most influential in the area of American economic history — questioned the founding fathers' motivations and prompted new perceptions of the supreme law of the land.

Excerpt from The Economic Interpretation of History The present work is substantially a reproduction, with some alterations, additions and rearrangements, of the articles that appeared in Volumes XVI and XVII of the Political Science Quarterly. The requests for reprints were so numerous that it seemed best to meet the demand by giving to the essays a more permanent form. May the treatment of the subject in the following pages lead to the fuller discussion which so important a topic deserves at the hands of economists, historians and philosophers alike. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

To the student of the social sciences it is interesting to observe the process by which, in one respect at least, we are drifting back to the position of bygone ages. Although Aristotle pointed out the essential interrelation of politics, ethics and economics, modern thought has successfully vindicated the claims of these disciplines, as well as of others, such as jurisprudence and the various divisions of public law, to be considered .separate sciences. For a long time, however, to the common detriment of all, the independence of each was so emphasized and exaggerated as to create the serious danger of forgetting that they are only constituent parts of a larger whole. The tendency of recent thought has been to accentuate the relations rather than the differences, and to explain the social institutions which form the bases of the separate sciences in the light rather of a synthesis than of an analysis. This method has been applied to the record of the past, as well as to the facts of the present; the conception of history has been broadened until it is now well recognized that political history is only one phase of that wider activity which includes all the phenomena of social life. If the term -politics- is used in the common but narrow sense of constitutional and diplomatic relations, then to repeat the familiar dictum, -History is past politics, - is to utter a half-truth, in lamentable disregard of these newer ideas.