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• Foreword
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Author’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: On Defining the Economic Point of View
• The Economic Point of View and the Scope of Economics
• The Multitude of Economic Points of View
• The Controversy Over the Utility of Definition
• An Interpretation of the Controversy
• The Economists and Their Definitions: the Classical Economists
• The Economic Point of View: the Background of the “methodenstreit”
• Twentieth–century Economic Points of View
• 2: The Science of Wealth and Welfare
• The Emergence of Political Economy As the Science of Wealth
• The Science of Material Wealth
• The Science of Subsistence
• The Science of Wealth Retained
• Man Against Nature
• From Wealth to Welfare
• The Science of the Lower Side of Human Nature
• 3: The Science of Avarice; Getting the Most For the Least
• The Science of Avarice
• The Economic Principle
• The “economic Impulse”
• Selfishness and “non-tuism”
• Economics and Mechanics
• 4: Economics, the Market, and Society
• Economics and Catallactics
• Exchange and the Propensity to Truck
• Exchange and the Division of Labor
• The “purely Formal” Concept of Exchange
• Exchange and the Economic System
• Economics, the Economy, and the “volkswirtschaft”
• Economy and Society
• 5: Economic Affairs, Money, and Measurement
• Money, Wealth, and Exchanges
• Money As the Measuring Rod
• Money As a Universal Measuring Rod
• Measurement and Economics
• Money and Price-economics
• Money As an Economic Institution
• 6: Economics and Economizing
• The Economics of Professor Robbins
• Scarcity and Economics
• Economizing and Maximization
• The Character of Robbins' Definition
• A. the “breadth” of Robbins' Definition
• B. the “formalism” of Robbins' Definition
• The Nature of Ends and Means
• “given” Ends and Means
• Single End and Multiple Ends
• Economics and Ethics: the Positive and the Normative
• The Nature of Economic Science and the Significance of Macroeconomics
• 7: Economics As a Science of Human Action
• I
• The Sciences of Human Action
• The Emergence of the Praxeological View of Economics
• Max Weber and Human Action
• Acting Man and Economizing Man: Mises and Robbins
• Ii
• Praxeology and Purpose
• Praxeology and Rationality
• The Assumption of Constant Wants—the Praxeological Context
• Praxeology, Apriorism, and Operationalism
• The Economic Point of View and Praxeology

Money as a Universal Measuring Rod

Before we discuss this fresh conception of economic affairs, it will be of interest to draw attention to a view that has the doubtful distinction of running precisely counter to that of Marshall while yet being built on the very same foundation. The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in the course of a campaign to prove that most of the “economic” categories are really common to all the social sciences, attempted to show that money too is not a strictly economic phenomenon. It is true, Tarde wrote, that money is a measure of wealth, but it is not a measure of wealth alone. Money, besides measuring wealth, measures desires and beliefs; it is a universal measure of all social “quantities,” of which wealth is only one.20 Tarde believed that he had thus broken the link that chained money exclusively to economics, whose subject matter, despite some fairly advanced statements in his writings, he still identified solely with richesses.

Both Marshall and Tarde, it will be observed, look upon money as significant primarily on account of its suitability to serve as a measuring rod of human motives. But in postulating the suitability of money as a measure of human motives, Marshall had by the same token held these motives to be economically relevant. Tarde, on the other hand, working unwaveringly on the assumption that only the phenomena of wealth are economic, and confronted with his own conception of money as measuring human desires, is forced to the triumphant conclusion that money itself pertains to noneconomic phenomena.

Clearly the conception of money as a measuring rod is something also of a two-edged sword, capable, perhaps, of replacing wealth as the criterion of the economic, but capable too of forcing itself outside the scope of economics altogether if the latter is defined as the science of wealth.

[[20]]See G. Tarde, Psychologie économique (Paris, 1902), p. 77.