aa6 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

this society's economic life, made it clear that this thesis of his was re-
stricted in its application to the social milieu of the Western World in its
Industrial Age,1 and hazarded the guess that this particular social milieu
in this particular society might already be passing away by the time at
which he was writing.2 In a book published in A.D. 1947 a Belgian eco-
nomist had expressed the view that

Texpansion contemporaine ... ne peut Łtre qu'un Episode de 1'histoire de
I'humanitd et doit se terminer un jour, soit devant des impossibility
materielles de continuer, soit parce que le complexe econornique et social
provoque la desagregation de 1'effort, soit enfin parce que les aspirations
collectives se donnent un autre bout'.3

Yet, ephemeral though the social milieu of these pulsations in the flow
of economic activity might prove to be, and brief though the experience
of these peculiar phenomena, occurring in these peculiar circumstances,
had actually been up to date, the fathers of a Western economic science
had succeeded, within less than two hundred years of the outbreak of the
Industrial Revolution in Great Britain,4 in descrying economic cycles of
divers wave-lengths in latter-day Western history, without allowing them-
selves to be inhibited by an age-old conundrum of Formal Logic that
was paralysing contemporary non-economic Western historians. The
Western economists satisfied the non-economic historians' most exacting
Rankean requirements in studying the course of history ww as cigentlich
gewesen and in taking due account of the element of uniqueness in each
single historical datum; but, unlike the non-economic historians, they did
not fail to grasp the not very novel or abstruse logical points that there
was also an element of uniformity common to one datum and another
and that this element of uniformity, so far from being proved illusory by
the coexistence of the element of uniqueness, was the background against
which the element of uniqueness showed up, and without which it
would have been invisible.5

This difference-in-likeness and likeness-in-diffcrencc was noted, for
example, by an investigator who had described a series of seven cycles in
the fluctuations of the incidence of unemployment in the economic his-
tory of the United Kingdom during the years A.D. 1850-1914:

'The general movement is ... rhythmic, both in respect of wave-
lengths and of amplitude. . , , The rhythm is rough and imperfect,6 All

carried out by means of borrowed money, which in general, though not by logical neces-
sity, implies credit creation', ' See Schumpeter, op, cit,, vol. i, pp, 144 and 323.

2 See ibid., p. 145.

3 Dupriez. L, H.: La MmmemenU Economiqucs G&n&mux (Louvain 1947, Institut d«
Recherches Econoiniques et Sociales, a vols.), vol. ii, p. afio,

* In Schumpeter's opinion, the minimum span of Known history that was required
for a study of cycles in Modern Western economic life was of the order of a$o years (op.
cit., vol. i, p. 330),

s The truth is, of course, as has been pointed out by W. C. Mitchell in Business Cycles^
the Problem and its Setting (New York 1930, National Bureau of Economic Research,
Inc.), p. 382, that the problem presented by the simultaneous uniqueness and uniformity
of the specimens of a species is a general problem of thought, not a special problem
peculiar to thought about business cycles.

f According to Mitchell, ibid., pp. 377 and 453-4, the statistical and the annaliatic
evidence concurred in indicating that business cycles were 'cyclic' in the sense of being
measurable recurrences, but were not 'periodic' in the sens* of being measurable recur-
rences with a uniformly regular wave-length.—AJ.T.