ABSTRACT
Political economy was still in its infancy when the first discussions of method were articulated. Dugald Stewart, in his memorial of Adam Smith, presented us with the importance of “conjectural histories” in understanding the evolution of economic and social institutions (Stewart [1794] 1980:5). Not much more than thirty years later, Nassau Senior and Richard Whately offered their defenses of the method they considered appropriate for the investigation of the particular subject matter of political economy (Senior 1836; Whately 1832; Prasch 1996).
