For my own part, such is not my conception of economic science,
the true social science. Instead of offering a priori arguments
as solutions of the formidable problems of the organization of
labor and the distribution of wealth, I shall interrogate
political economy as the depositary of the secret thoughts of
humanity; I shall cause it to disclose the facts in the order of
their occurrence, and shall relate their testimony without
intermingling it with my own. It will be at once a triumphant
and a lamentable history, in which the actors will be ideas, the
episodes theories, and the dates formulas.
CHAPTER III.
ECONOMIC EVOLUTIONS.--FIRST PERIOD.--THE DIVISION OF LABOR.
The fundamental idea, the dominant category, of political economy
is VALUE.
Value reaches its positive determination by a series of
oscillations between SUPPLY and DEMAND.
Consequently, value appears successively under three aspects:
useful value, exchangeable value, and synthetic, or social,
value, which is true value. The first term gives birth to the
second in contradiction to it, and the two together, absorbing
each other in reciprocal penetration, produce the third: so that
the contradiction or antagonism of ideas appears as the point of
departure of all economic science, allowing us to say of it,
parodying the sentence of Tertullian in relation to the Gospel,
Credo quia absurdum: There is, in social economy, a latent truth
wherever there is an apparent contradiction, Credo quia
contrarium.
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