224 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

surance companies to open up a new branch of their business by quoting
premiums for insurance against the formidable risks arising from eco-
nomic fluctuations.1 On the other hand, scientific investigators had
rushed in where business men were still fearing to tread; and, in Modern
Western history, disinterested scientific research had been apt to be
followed by a profitable industrial application of the results as surely as,
in the field of contemporary Western colonial enterprise, the advent of
the missionary had been followed by that of the trader and the soldier.
The still disinterestedly academic students of latter-day Western 'busi-
ness cycles' seemed, circa A.D. 1952, to be agreed that these particular
economic patterns were peculiar to a social milieu in which a monetary
economy had driven a barter economy off the field, in which Agriculture
had become socially subordinate to Commerce and Industry, and in
which the process of manufacture (in defiance of the etymology of the
word) had come to be performed by power supplied, not by the muscles
of men and non-human animals, but by inanimate forces of Nature
ranging from winds caught in the sails of ships and windmills to electrons
liberated in plant capable of splitting atoms.

'Business cycles which affect the fortunes of the mavss of people in a
country, which succeed each other continuously, and which attain a
semblance of regularity, do not become prominent in the economic his-
tory of a country until a large proportion of its people are living mainly by
making and spending money incomes.'2

'The "cause", if we wish to use that term, of business cycles ... is to
be found in the habits and customs (institutions) of men which make up
the money economy, with its money and credit, prices, private property,
buying and selling, and so on—all loaded, so to speak, on the industrial
process.'3

In the history of the Western Civilization, business cycles had made
their epiphany pan passu with the prevalence of a money economy in
which the incentive to economic action was a desire to earn profits
reckoned in monetary values;4 and this cyclic rhythm in the flow of
economic activity was a phenomenon that appeared to be peculiar to
Modern Western business organization.5

'Presumably this contention that business cycles arise from that peculiar
form of economic organisation which has come to prevail in England
within the last two centuries, and over much of the World in more recent
times, would be admitted by most theorists.'6

'The conception of business cycles obtained from a survey of con-
temporary reports starts with the fundamental fact of rhythmical fluctua-

1 The unwillingness of the insurance companies to do business in economic fluctua-
tions up to date was probably due to an excessive uncertainty in the relevant statistics
rather than to an excessive timidity or conservatism on the part of business men who
had recently ventured no less spiritedly than profitably into the new field opened up for
insurance by the mechanization of road traffic.

z Mitchell, W. C.: Business Cycles, The Problem and its Setting (New York 10.37 (and
impression 1930), National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.)i p. 458. The quotations
from this book have been made with the permission of the author and the publishers.

3 Frank, L. K.: 'A Theory of Business Cycles,* in The Quarterly Journal of Economic^
vol. xaacvii (Cambridge, Mass. 19*3, Harvard University Press), pp. 645-42, quoted by
Mitchell in op. cit., p. 45. * See Mitchell, op, cit. pp. 62 and 63.

* See ibid., p. 6x. & Ibid., p. 56,