ABSTRACT
Generally speaking, historians are loath to report on current or very recent movements, and the very sound reasons for this disinclination will soon become clear to readers of this chapter. In examining the nature of and reasons for the revival of subjectivism in economics the obvious strategy is to begin by defining the subject and then proceed to trace its origins, development and pre-revival decline; but unfortunately this is much easier said than done. Quite apart from the problem of definition, which will be considered later, the origins of subjectivism in economics go back at least as far as the medieval scholastics, perhaps even to the Greeks, and its subsequent history has been complex as well as protracted. As it is obviously impossible to cover all this ground in the time allotted, an arbitrary choice of starting-point is unavoidable.
