Theory and History

The sciences of human action, to which I have referred in general, divide into two large branches: theory and history. The theory of human action is economics as we have approached it up to now. That is, theory is a formal, abstract, qualitative, and general study of the processes of human interaction. History, the other essential branch the social scientist needs, consists of the systematic study of past events related to human action. These past events related to human action may be from the distant past, which in colloquial terms we call “history,” or they may be from the recent or very recent past. In fact, what happened this morning is already history. In the social sciences, the history of the recent past is called the “economic structure.” In colloquial terms, “history” refers to the events of the more distant past, and “structure” refers to recent history. The global economic structure, or Spain’s economic structure, is the recent history of the global economy, or of Spain’s economy. It is history from last month or last year, but it is history. In fact, everything that took place a second ago is already history.