ABSTRACT
The organizer of this symposium deliberately posed a sweeping, over ambitious open-ended question to which there is obviously no single answer. As the first contributor I am privileged, for I am not constrained by the fear of duplicating what my fellow symposiasts are going to say. The duplication, in any case, is unlikely to be great given my somewhat idiosyncratic approach, which focuses on the general intellectual and social context of economic thought, rather than on the development of economic analysis. There is, of course, ample scope for both, and indeed other, interpretative standpoints.
