ABSTRACT
Unfortunately the positivistic methodology of hypothesis, deduction and testing is, when applied to the domain of economic formations and of social phenomena in general, confronted by obstacles not encountered in the domain of physical phenomena. The large-scale social structures which confront the economist when he makes the attempt to apply his theories to reality are, first of all, typically more complex and less determinately delineated than the more or less cleanly isolable segments of material reality which are at the disposal of the physicist in his laboratory.3 But the crucial difference between the object-worlds of the economist and of the physicist consists in the fact that the individual economic agent who constitutes the most important element in the domain of economic theory exhibits one trait, consciousness, entirely absent from the realm of physics.4
