Dreamtaste：你好！

许多初学者和本学科之外的学生常常会提出此类问题，我想回答这个问题最简便的方法是引用李世民的一句话，“以铜为鉴，可以正衣冠；以人为鉴，可以明得失；以史为鉴，可以知兴替。”

首先，从济学的角度来说，“经济史是经济学的源”这句话我不想多说，因为在国内真正从经济史中发展出经济理论来的并不多见，要举出例子来，我还是比较推崇斯密的《国富论》，因为书中确实是“有理有据”、“论从史出”；再有就是弗里德曼，他与施瓦茨合著的《美国货币史·1867-1960年》；以及罗斯托的经济发展阶段论，格雷夫的比较制度分析。我读的书不多，一举例子就捉襟见肘。

其次是经济史来验证经济理论，最明显的是诺斯的《经济史中的结构与变迁》，作者从历史经验来论证产权理论，当然也不能将这本书完全看成是对经济理论的验证，毕竟作者通过经济史的考察而得出的制度变迁理论还是独树一帜的。

此外，国内最为普遍的做法是通过行业史、专门史来总结经验，比如现在最为热门的金融史（具体到证券史、银行史，以及钱庄史、票号史）、企业史（具体到股份公司研究、家族企业研究）。

最后，我认为学习经济史最主要的还是学习这门学科的研究方法和思考问题的方式，经济史是经济学与历史学的交叉学科，虽然经济学的经济史与历史学的经济史有许多不同，但是追根溯源、考察某一问题的来龙去脉则是两者的共同之处，所以我建议高校的经济史专业主要讲授历史观和经济史学方法论，而不赞成将经济史专业变成朝代史，更不赞成行业史，这种做法都会缩小学生的视野，授人以鱼，而不是授人以渔。

贴一下熊彼特的看法吧（中文译文可参看《经济分析史》第一编第一章第2节。）

Why Do We Study the History of Economics?

Well, why do we study the history of any science? Current work, so one would think, will preserve whatever is still useful of the work of preceding generations. Concepts, methods, and results that are not so preserved are presumably not worth bothering about. Why then should we go back to old authors and rehearse outmoded views? Cannot the old stuff be safely left to the care of a few specialists who love it for its own sake?

There is much to be said for this attitude. It is certainly better to scrap outworn modes of thought than to stick to them indefinitely. Nevertheless, we stand to profit from visits to the lumber room provided we do not stay there too long. The gains with which we may hope to emerge from it can be displayed under three heads: pedagogical advantages, new ideas, and insights into the ways of the human mind. We shall take these up in turn, at first without special reference to economics and then add, under a fourth head, some reasons for believing that in economics the case for a study of the history of analytic work is still stronger than it is for other fields.

First, then, teachers or students who attempt to act upon the theory that the most recent treatise is all they need will soon discover that they are making things unnecessarily difficult for themselves. Unless that recent treatise itself presents a minimum of historical aspects, no amount of correctness, originality, rigor, or elegance will prevent a sense of lacking direction and meaning from spreading among the students or at least the majority of students. This is because, whatever the field, the problems and methods that are in use at any given time embody the achievements and carry the scars of work that has been done in the past under entirely different conditions. The significance and validity of both problems and methods cannot be fully grasped without a knowledge of the previous problems and methods to which they are the (tentative) response. Scientific analysis is not simply a logically consistent process that starts with some primitive notions and then adds to the stock in a straight-line fashion. It is not simply progressive discovery of an objective reality—as is, for example, discovery in the basin of the Congo. Rather it is an incessant struggle with creations of our own and our predecessors’ minds and it ‘progresses,’ if at all, in a criss-cross fashion, not as logic, but as the impact of new ideas or observations or needs, and also as the bents and temperaments of new men, dictate. Therefore, any treatise that attempts to render ‘the present state of science’ really renders methods, problems, and results that are historically conditioned and are meaningful only with reference to the historical background from which they spring. To put the same thing somewhat differently: the state of any science at any given time implies its past history and cannot be satisfactorily conveyed without making this implicit history explicit. Let mw add at once that this pedagogical aspect will be kept in mind throughout the book and that it will guide the choice of material for discussion, sometimes at the expense of other important criteria.

Second, our minds are apt to derive new inspiration from the study of the history of science. Some do so more than others, but there are probably few that do not derive from it any benefit at all. A man's mind must be indeed sluggish if, standing back from the work of his time and beholding the wide mountain ranges of past thought, he does not experience a widening of his own horizon. The productivity of this experience may be illustrated by the fact that the fundamental ideas that eventually developed into the theory of (special) relativity occurred first in a book on the history of mechanics[1]. But, besides inspiration every one of us may glean lessons from the history of his science that are useful, even though sometimes discouraging. We learn about both the futility and the fertility of controversies; about detours, wasted efforts, and blind alleys; about spells of arrested growth, about our dependence on chance, about how not to do things, about leeways to make up for. We learn to understand why we are as far as we actually are and also why we are not further. And we learn what succeeds and how and why—a question to which attention will be paid throughout this book.

Third, the highest claim that can be made for the history of any science or of science in general is that it teaches us much about the ways of the human mind. To be sure, the material it presents bears only upon a particular kind of intellectual activity. But within this field its evidence is almost ideally complete. It displays logic in the concrete, logic in action, logic wedded to vision and to purpose. Any field of human action displays the human mind at work but in no other field do we get so near the actual methods of working because in no other field do people take so much trouble to report on their mental processes. Different men have behaved differently in this respect. Some, like Huyghens, were frank; others, like Newton, were reticent. But even the most reticent of scientists are bound to reveal their mental processes because scientific—unlike political—performance is self-revelatory by nature. It is for this reason mainly that it has been recognized many times—from Whewell and J. S. Mill to Wundt and Dewey—that the general science of science (the German Wissenschaftslehre) is not only applied logic but also a laboratory for pure logic itself. That is to say, scientific habits or rules of procedure are not merely to be judged by logical standards that exist independently of them; they contribute something to, and react back upon, these logical standards themselves. To convey the point by the useful device of exaggeration: a sort of pragmatic or descriptive logic may be abstracted from observation and formulation of scientific procedures—which of course involve, or merge into, the study of the history of sciences.

Fourth, it stands to reason that the preceding arguments, at least the ones that have been presented under the first two headings, apply with added force to the special case of economics. We shall attend presently to the implications of the obvious fact that the subject matter of economics is itself a unique historical process (see sec. 3 below) so that, to a large extent, the economics of different epochs deal with different sets of facts and problems. This fact alone would suffice to lend increased interest to doctrinal history. But let us discard it for the moment in order to avoid repetition and to emphasize another fact. As we shall see, scientific economics does not lack historical continuity. It is in fact our main purpose to describe what may be called the process of the Filiation of Scientific Ideas—the process by which men’s efforts to understand economic phenomena produce, improve, and pull down analytic structures in an unending sequence. And it is one of the main theses to be established in this book that fundamentally this process does not differ from the analogous processes in other fields of knowledge. But, for reasons that it is also one of our purposes to make clear, this filiation of ideas has met with more inhibitions in our field than it has in almost all others. Few people, and least of all we economists ourselves, are prone to offer us congratulations on our intellectual achievements. Moreover our performance is, and always was, not only modest but also disorganized. Methods of fact-finding and analysis that are and were considered substandard or wrong on principle by some of us do prevail and have prevailed widely with others. Although it is possible nevertheless—as I shall try to show—to speak for every epoch of established professional opinion on scientific topics and although this opinion has often stood the test of being proof against strong differences in political views, we cannot speak with as much confidence about it as can physicists or mathematicians. In consequence we cannot, or at least we do not, trust one another to sum up ‘the state of the science’ in an equally satisfactory manner. And the obvious remedy for the shortcomings of summarizing works is the study of doctrinal history: much more than in, say, physics is it true in economics that modern problems, methods, and results cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of how economists have come to reason as they do. In addition, much more than in physics have results been lost on the way or remained in abeyance for centuries. We shall meet with instances that are little short of appalling. Stimulating suggestions and useful if disconcerting lessons are much more likely to come to the economist who studies the history of his science than to the physicist who can, in general, rely on the fact that almost nothing worth while has been lost of the work of his predecessors. Why, then, not start in at once upon another story of intellectual conquest?

[此贴子已经被作者于2006-10-16 16:11:13编辑过]

收获有三类：1）在教学方法上有所裨益；2）获得新的观念；3）了解人类的思维方法。

1）除非最近的论著本身反映出最起码的历史面貌，否则不管它怎样正确，怎样有创见，怎样严密或者优雅动听，都不能阻止学生产生一种缺乏方向与意义的感觉，至少在大部分学生中会有这种感觉。

不管在哪个学术领域，任何时期存在的问题和使用的方法都包含过去在完全不同的条件下工作的成就，而且仍然带有当时留下的创痕。当前的问题和方法都是对以前的问题和方法作出的（尝试性的）反应。如果不知道以前的问题和方法，那么对现在的问题和方法的意义与正确性就不能充分加以掌握。

任何特定时间的任何科学状况都隐含它过去的历史背景，如果不把这个隐含的历史明摆出来，就不能圆满地表述这种科学的状况。

2）我们的头脑很容易从科学史的研究中得到新的灵感。有些人比别人得到的多一些，但完全得不到裨益的大概很少。

我们学会弄清为什么我们实际上走到多远以及为什么没有走得更远。我们也知道接着而来的是什么，以及怎样和为什么接着而来。

3）人类行动的任何领域都能显示人类的心智活动，但是没有哪个领域像经济学领域这样逼近实际的思想方法；因为在其他领域中人们不会这样不厌其烦地报告他们思想活动的过程。

[此贴子已经被作者于2006-10-16 16:13:45编辑过]