 Today we're going to talk about approaches to economic history and approaches to history. If there's no change, there's no history. So when we talk about history, we're talking about change. When we talk about what causes history, we're talking about what causes change. For a long time in Europe, and we're basically talking in terms of the European historiographic tradition, for a long time Europeans thought they understood history. History was the playing out of God's plan. Why did the Assyrians destroy the temple? Because God was mad. Why did the Roman Empire fall? Because God was angry at the Romans. History was the history of the playing out of God's plan. So the basic historical text was the Bible. There was a bit of a change with the so-called enlightenment, but it wasn't as big a change as you'd think. For Leibniz, the great enlightenment philosopher in Germany in the 17th century, everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Because God, while we don't understand God, Leibniz went beyond the Bible and said, well, we can't really understand what God is up to. But God is all powerful and all good. Therefore, everything must be for the best. We may not understand it, but it's got to be for the best. Tell that to the people at the Warsaw ghetto. Voltaire and others didn't need the Holocaust to have an idea that there might be something wrong with Leibniz's conception. Maybe things just happen. For Voltaire history happens without regard for any divine plan. Maybe there's a divinity, maybe there's not, but whatever it is doesn't get involved. Instead, history happens because people make it happen. And why did they do it? Because it advances their material interests. Voltaire was followed by Ludwig Feuerbach, German philosopher in the 19th century, who wrote The Essence of Christianity, published in 1843, which totally shocked everybody at the time because he said that even Christianity is not divinely inspired. Some of us Jews might have no problem about that, but most Christians did. Even Christianity was not divinely inspired. It was created by people who had material interests, in particular it was created by the slaves in the Roman Empire, who developed Christianity to advance their own good wishes or goals or material interests. Feuerbach's approach, we could label, follow the money. Looked at who benefits and they're probably the ones doing this thing in history. Look for material explanations of behavior, and this is the dominant approach in history and in economic history. Forget about ideal interests. People will masquerade. They'll say they're doing this for God or country or whatever, but really they're doing it for oil or they're doing it for gold or they're doing it for money or they're doing it for some selfish interest. Explain historical actions in terms of people's selfish material interests. This approach is great for debunking people. Somebody says, oh, we need to invade and promote democracy, whatever. Well, just say, yeah, you're doing it for oil. Great debunking. Material interests are powerful. There's oftentimes simple materialism, just saying people do it for the money works. Remember, even Frodo put the ring on at the end. Even Frodo succumbs to material interests. Now for simple materialist history becomes a science. You can just add up the material interests and calculate who's going to win. This is the vision in Isaac Asimov's famous science fiction trilogy, The Foundation. Read it. It's a lot more fun than my lectures. Great science fiction. It inspired me when I was young. It's the vision behind neoclassical economic history. That's a mouthful. Parents will wonder, what are you getting out of this online course? Tell them you're learning about neoclassical economic history. Whew. They'll be impressed. For neoclassicism, everything is driven by selfish interests, and selfish interests depend on the working out of underlying material conditions. Three in particular, factor endowments, how much land, labor, resources, capital are there, technology, and preferences. Neoclassists assume preferences don't change. People always want the same stuff, so it really comes down to factor endowments and technology. These two things change over time, changing material interests and explaining them is the business of economic history. Explain changes in technology because great men invent things at MIT, explain changes in resources, relative supplies of factors because of demography or the discovery of oil, and you've got it all. Neoclassical economic history has no real conflict. Oh, there can be accidents. There can be mistakes. We can end up with something like the stupid QWERTY keyboard, Q-W-E-R-T-Y, the letters at the top of your left hand. Why did they put the E, the most commonly used letter, in your upper left middle finger? Really inconvenient. The A is on the pinky? Dumb idea, but it happened and was stuck with it. But it's not about conflict. That was just a mistake. Marks and the marks is brought in a different idea. While marks is often called a simple materialist, that's a misunderstanding. What Marks is really about, as he says in the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, is class conflict. Marks believes that people act according to their understanding of the world which they receive through physical contact with material, but the key material in shaping people's vision, what people want, how they feel about things, the chief material is experiential. It's not just that there's stuff out there, but it's how you relate and you relate often to fighting with somebody. How do children discover their own vision of themselves, to fighting with their parents? How do people discover that they themselves as members of a class or a country, to fighting with people in other classes? Capitalists fighting with workers, workers fighting with capitalists, Americans fighting with Germans. You discover yourself through participation in social action and conflict. That's the Marxian vision. It derives from Feierbach, Voltaire and the materialist, but it diverges. In one path, you go to the Neoclassist, which we will be talking about throughout the semester, in another path you get a whole set of Marxian and Marxian derived visions of history as the working out of human conflict. And that's what the rest of this course is going to be all about. Thank you and have a good day.