ABSTRACT
In 1620, Frances Bacon urged that “a new beginning has to be made from the lowest foundations, unless one is content to go around in circles for ever, with meager, almost negligible progress” (2000: 31). Buoyed by the scientific optimism of the age, he impugned over-reliance on Aristotolian syllogisms, calling instead for induction, experimentation, and testing hypotheses. “The world,” argued Bacon, “must not be contracted to the narrow limits of the understanding (as it has been heretofore) but the understanding must be liberated and expanded to take in the image of the world as it is found to be” (2000: 226). More than three centuries later, at the start of the new millennium, French university students petitioned their economics professors in the Baconian spirit, as follows:
Most of us have chosen to study economics so as to acquire a deep understanding of the economic phenomena with which citizens of today are confronted. But the teaching that is offered, that is to say for the most part neoclassical theory or approaches derived from it, does not generally answer this expectation.
