Introduction

After Schweigaard the Norwegian milieu of economists grew. Aschehoug was the natural follower of Schweigaard, but he was not alone. Some of his most prominent contemporary economists (and jurists) were Hertzberg, Aarum, Morgenstierne and Jaeger.

A presentation of Aschehoug's views on economic thought and specifically what he says about method and theory will be included. This chapter will end with a small section about the debate on methods which took place during the 1890s at the Statsøkonomisk forening. It was Oscar Jaeger who lectured about method, and the other economists participated in the debate which followed. They mostly accepted the presentation of Jaeger, at least after the turn of the century. The question was whether theoretical economics (and accordingly a more deductive method) should be divided from practical economics (accordingly a more inductive method). Aschehoug did not believe in such a sharp division between what he called the ‘pure’ and the ‘applied’ (social) economics (socialøkonomik), which is why he does not explicitly make this division through his Socialøkonomik, and why he accepts the dual use of methods, even though he distinguishes between socialøkonomik/economics and socialøkonomi/economy in the first chapter (see further comments later in this chapter).

First and foremost, is it possible to talk about a Norwegian historical school in economics? The answer is twofold. There are specific traits of a historical approach in method, namely the emphasis on studying statistics and history.