ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by offering a review of how economics has become the way it is in terms of its shifting methodological, social and historical content. These are all brought together to examine the social and historical content of economic theory as it has evolved. Section 2 of this chapter ranges over the methodological, theoretical and technical momentum of the discipline’s theory, as well as the role of external intellectual and material factors. It does so to explain not only how economics should be able to forget the social and historical but also to seek to reclaim it without missing a step in its forward march. Economics has undergone enormous change in both content and scope with scarcely a backward glance at what it has discarded.
