ABSTRACT
In preceding chapters we have observed the growing lure of general theorising in economics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The idea became established that the principles of economics must be universal in scope: they must apply to all types of economic system and to all historical periods. As Philip Mirowski (1989) and others have discussed in detail, the desire of economists to emulate physics and other seemingly universal ‘hard sciences’ is part of this story. Developments in mathematics were also important. The development of the integral calculus and the ascension of the field theory concept encouraged and enabled the search for universals (Potts, 2000). These ideas penetrated economics in the 1870s and began to power an institutionalised engine of formalisation that accelerated after the Second World War and eventually transformed the whole subject. Historicism did not survive this transformation. This formalist revolution eventually converted ‘the whole of economics into a branch of applied mathematics’ (Blaug, 1999, p. 276).
