For the most part, early social theory was confined, for its subject matter, to what we now regard as the special province of political theory or political science. It is true that Aristotle composed a book which is sometimes designated as "Economics," though it seems doubtful whether he gave it that title; and it is also true that there are, in the Politics, a few scattered passages relating to topics that we now conceive as the province of the economist. On the other hand, it is quite certain that Aristotle regarded his so-called "Economics" as a work in the field of "practical wisdom" and not a contribution to science at all; and it was in this spirit that economic questions were dealt with, almost exclusively, for two thousand years. When what we now think of as the topics and problems of economics first received some separate, systematic, and reflective attention, they were thought of as special problems of politics and government, a conception reflected in the name that the new science presently came to have--"political economy." The same point of view is indicated by the title of Adam Smith great book The Wealth of Nations.

In short, before men could conceive of a science of wealth in the abstract, before they could grasp the idea of economic science as something different and distinct from political science on the one hand and common-sense principles of private enterprise on the other, it was necessary for certain developments to take place. Of these the most fundamental was the mobilization of wealth. Up to the period that we call "late medieval" or "early modern," wealth was scarcely susceptible of being amassed, without limit, in the hands of private citizens, of being transferred freely from one man to another, from one country to another, or from the members of one social class to those of another. As late as the fifteenth century, the principal form of wealth known to human experience was land; and land was associated in a fundamental and indisputable way with the facts of sovereignty and government. In fact, during the feudal period, governmental authority was to a large extent derived from the ownership of land; to own or hold in feudal tenure an extensive tract gave one virtually sovereign authority over the people who lived there. During the thirteenth century, however, there was a considerable increase of commerce in Western Europe and, later, a considerable development of manufacturing. Within a relatively short space of time, it came about that among the people of wealth were included not only the great landowners but also the prosperous merchants. Wealth had assumed a mobile form; it could pass freely from one person to another, and, what was more disconcerting to begin with, it could flow freely from one state across the boundaries of another. Circumstances were arising that would make it possible to study the attributes of wealth and the processes of its production, distribution, and valuation in abstraction from the interests and activities of states.

Before this could happen effectively, however, something else had to happen: the concept of science must be more clearly defined than it had been heretofore. It is generally agreed, today, that social science presents greater difficulties to the student than do the physical and biological sciences; just why this is we need not stop to inquire, but it seems to be true, in the main, that the development of social science has followed that of the other sciences and has taken its methods and point of view from them, perhaps with rather unfortunate results in some respects. However, the development of physical and biological science, as science in the modern sense, has been of recent date. Although Aristotle is often referred to as a pioneer natural scientist, he can scarcely be said to have arrived at the idea of science in the modern sense; still less did he develop a rigorous method for the pursuit of any kind of science. In his view, a science was simply a division of fundamental human knowledge. Little or no advance was made upon the achievements of Aristotle in this respect for fifteen hundred years after his death. In the thirteenth century A.D., however, there began to take shape, in scholastic circles, a new movement, or tendency of thought, called "nominalism" which was prophetic and perhaps causative of some of the features of the development of modern scientific thought. Nominalism was a theory of knowledge or metaphysical doctrine, developed by some of the Schoolmen on the foundation of the supposed teachings of Aristotle and in contrast to the Platonic idealism, which was then called "realism." By the medieval realists it was contended that the only true realities of this world are those represented by our abstract and general concepts, the "ideas" of Plato. By the nominalists, on the other hand, it was asserted that the particulars of immediate experience are the true realities; general ideas or conceptual terms are only names--nomina. The important thing about nominalism, for our purposes, is that it afforded a logical reason for the shift of attention, on the part of scholars and intellectuals, from general ideas which were in fact little more than the timehonored traditional beliefs of Western Christianity and culture to the particulars of sense experience and observation. Among the prominent nominalists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were several men who are also known to us as forerunners of modern science. Possibly the most important of these, conspicuous, at any rate, for the influence that he exerted on later thought and the prestige that came to be attached to his name, was Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-1294), who was interested in the possibilities of something that resembled experimental science and who, in this respect, anticipated some of the ideas of his better known successor and namesake Francis Bacon. . .