ABSTRACT
The writers surveyed up to this point worked mainly within the equilibrium tradition of mainstream economics. The Austrians and Knight were exceptions, because they were particularly interested in disequilibrium processes. In the main, however, neoclassical economics concentrated on end-states (i.e., solutions in which the effects of uncertainty have been expunged from consideration). Uncertainty in the sense of the incalculable has no meaning in this mainstream approach, because solutions to economic problems require that the actual and the calculable coincide. Deviations of one from the other, such as true uncertainty allows, cannot be fully accommodated within the equilibrium tradition. Thus Maurice Dobb (1937, p. 559) correctly asserted that “In a system of economic equilibrium the work of the entrepreneur cannot be qualitatively different from that of any other agent of production.”
