The economists of the English historical school were in general agreement on several ideas. They pursued an inductive approach to economics rather than the deductive approach taken by classical and neoclassical theorists. They recognised the need for careful statistical research. They rejected the hypothesis of "the profit maximizing individual" or the "calculus of pleasure and pain" as the only basis for economic analysis and policy. They believed that it was more reasonable to base analysis on the collective whole of altruistic individuals.[4] Historical economists of the nineteenth century also rejected the view that economic policy prescriptions, however derived, would apply universally, without regard to place or time, as followers of the Ricardian and Marshallian schools did.
Alfred Marshall acknowledged the force of the historical school's views in his 1890 synthesis:
[T]he explanation of the past and the prediction of the future are not different operations, but the same worked in opposite directions, the one from effect to cause, the other from cause to effect. As Schmoller well says, to obtain "a knowledge of individual causes" we need "induction; the final conclusion of which is indeed nothing but the inversion of the Syllogism which is employed in deduction.... Induction and deduction rest on the same tendencies, the same beliefs, the same needs of our reason."[5]
Geoffrey Martin Hodgson, "Alfred Marshall and the British Methodendiskurs", How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in the Social Sciences, pp. 95–112. Routledge (2001) ISBN0-415-25716-6
Spiegel, Henry William (1991). The Growth of Economic Thought. Durham & London: Duke University Press. ISBN0-8223-0973-4