The driving force of history

At Investopedia, in the article Robert E. Lucas Jr., note 4 links to a PDF on Lucas taken from the Econ Journal Watch article "Ideological Profiles of the Economics Laureates". Some background from that article:

For college, Lucas had intended to pursue engineering, but, as the University of Chicago offered him a scholarship but had no engineering program, he instead went into history. After earning his bachelor’s degree, he went for a graduate degree in history at the University of California at Berkeley. An economic history course inspired Lucas to switch to economics; he abandoned the history program and returned to the University of Chicago to earn his Ph.D. in economics...

Lucas continued to study history. In 2008 he stated: “I read [Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto] as an undergraduate student and I liked [his] sense that economic theory could give us a unified way about thinking about all known societies. I thought that ambition was a noble one, and an accurate one, and I bought into it. Economics is an extremely powerful way of looking at the forces that shape any society. In that sense, all of us economists are Marxists”.

The Investopedia article says simply

Initially, he believed his academic life would center around history, and he only continued his economic studies after reaching the conclusion that economics is the true driving force of history.

There. That's where Lucas and I think alike: that economics is the true driving force of history. Except, not economics (the study of what economists think about how the economy works), no. Rather, economic forces are the true driving force of history.

At Investopedia, this follows:

Lucas claimed to have studied economics via a "Marxist" point of view, in the sense that Marx believed the vast, impersonal forces that drive history are largely a matter of economics.

That sentence links to the Econ Journal Watch extract, noted above, which quotes Lucas:

I was getting more interested in economics and economic history as a history student. The work of Henri Pirenne, the Belgian historian, who stressed economic forces influenced me.

Pirenne: somebody else I have to look into.

There it is again, by the way, in Lucas's own words: "economic forces".

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In that same excerpt, Lucas also says:

When I was at Berkeley I started taking some economic history classes and even attended an economics course. That is when I first learned what a technical field economics is and how impossible it would be to pick it up as an amateur.

Dick.

The trouble with economics is that these days nobody thinks it through for himself the way Keynes did, the way Adam Smith did. Nobody begins by doubting everything the way Descartes did. Everybody just builds on what others have done. That is why incorrect ideas get built into economic thought.

And, too,

That's why economics these days is the study of what economists think, when it should be the study of economic forces.