ABSTRACT
Theoretical economics, which was regarded a few decades ago more or less as a curiosity, a species of barren pedantry from the infancy of the science, can in our day, in contrast, congratulate itself on a steadily growing number of active adherents. This is true above all of the Anglo-American literature, but also of Italian, Austrian and Swiss writers, to some extent the French, too; indeed, even in Germany proper, that bastion of the historical school, the modern theoretical orientation has begun to win a degree of attention, even if this attention, so far, is mostly antagonistic. However, gratifying though this activity in the theoretical field is in other ways, it suffers from one substantial deficiency, which is perhaps connected with the manner in which the whole movement arose.
