ABSTRACT
RUG Part of economists’ hang-ups of the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries is their excessive envy for the purported certainties of the “hard” sciences. Being generally secularists, economic thinkers have rejected Natural Law as no more than simple seventeenth and eighteenth century folklore. Instead, they hold that theirs are worlds and minds, both in the nature of the tabula rasa. ’Twere only it was so. Ours is not a world starting from a blank slate: Robinson Crusoe was no more than an imaginary device of a clever writer. The difficult problem we must face is how to recognize what has been so indelibly inscribed both in our view of the world, and certainly in the ways that our cognition operates.
