Muck and Magic or Change and Progress: Vitalism versus Hamiltonian Matter-of-Fact Knowledge

In chapter V, titled “Change and Progress,” in his now classic Evolutionary Economics: A Study of Change in Economic Thought, David Hamilton contrasted beliefs in magic and mystic potencies with the matter-of-fact knowledge of technology in the form of tools, machines, and techniques of production (1999, 93, 109, 111, 112). As with most evolutionary economists, his view of technological change and progress is derived from Charles Darwin (Hamilton 1999, 121, 25–28). It is also “relatively optimistic” (116, 115). Though critical of the static Newtonian worldview and its simplistic absorption in the core of economic methods and methodology, Hamilton was not directly critical of scientific inquiry, including physics. Certainly, as Hamilton recognized, the eighteenth century Newtonians shared the optimism of the later Darwinians (20). Nor was Hamilton critical of eighteenth century social perspective based on overturning the reverence for the classical civilization with “enlightened reason” nor with the “revolutionary effects of the displacement of the medieval cosmology by new ways of viewing things” (20). He may have been, but specifically, Hamilton argued that this new way of thought was “not as revolutionary as some of its chief progenitors and many of its later interpreters thought it to be” (20). The intent of the eighteenth century theorists may have been worthy, but the execution was faulty. We could further generalize and argue that almost all of what was known as science or natural philosophy in Western culture at that time, implicitly or explicitly, assumed some non-empirical, non-verifiable vital essence.