ABSTRACT
Mainstream economics, like vulgar economy and marginalism, leads to a fundamentally ahistorical approach. Since human agency is reduced to the atomistic interaction of individuals who pursue their subjective self-interest, there is no reason to expect change unless there is a change in the subjective preferences of the individuals. If society is nothing more than a sum of individuals, then unless individuals change, there is no social change. But since individuals are characterised in terms of subjective preferences which only each individual knows (and are indeed taken as exogenous data), there is no objective basis for a theory of history.
