ABSTRACT
Hicks’s contribution to economic scholarship covers a range of perspectives that is seldom found in the lifework of an individual researcher. As a matter of fact, Hicks paid attention to economic decision making but, at the same time, withdrew from the abstract (axiomatic) approach to pure theory and emphasized the importance of accurate description as a field in which innovative conception could emerge. In particular, he stressed the relationship between economic theory and economic history as of fundamental methodological significance, both in identifying the intrinsic limits of economic theorizing and in assessing the relationship between free choice and determinism, i.e. between economic rationality and irreversible processes.
