ABSTRACT
It is time to cast back a little over the history of ideas. The discipline of economics arose from the search for laws producing order in an economy without centralized control. It achieved this mainly through deductive reasoning from a limited set of premises about the real world, but a set of premises based on the conditions of a specific period in time. It follows (Heimann 1945: 10):
that economic theory is the doctrine of the system of free enterprise, and originally of nothing else. It is a historical discipline, in the specific sense of the word, emerging at a certain moment and bound to be reabsorbed into a more comprehensive and complex structure of social science as the system of free enterprise is itself transformed and absorbed into a more centralized structure of economic society, with central and local controls in complicated combination.
