Harriet Martineau's Empiricism
重新解读哈丽特·马蒂诺1832年的《政治经济学图解》系列小说，指出其并非简单的李嘉图主义，而是通过马尔萨斯视角强调归纳法和历史因素对经济科学的重要性，对研究经济学方法论和思想史有参考价值。
Abstract In 1832 Harriet Martineau began writing a series of fictional tales intended to illustrate the principles of political economy. By 1834 monthly sales numbers for the series were prolific and Martineau was gaining an international reputation. The Illustrations of Political Economy has long been read as advancing a simplistic popular Ricardianism that spoke powerfully to its immediate audience but became obsolete within just a few decades. This article complicates these assumptions by showing how the tales take a Malthusian stance on questions regarding the proper scope and method of economic science and hence anticipate the inductivist and historicist critiques of Ricardian economics that Malthus inspired. The process by which she conducted research for the tales and the process by which her characters learn economic lessons resemble the inductive process that the Cambridge inductivists and later the English historical economists posited as an alternative to the abstract and deductive method they associated with Ricardo. These tales also reveal how cultural, religious, and historical forces influence economic life and economic decision-making, suggesting that, as the inductive and historical economists often argued, understanding these forces was essential to arriving at a true understanding of political economy.