ABSTRACT
For the argument of this paper it is essential to distinguish, no matter how crudely, between economic analysis and the observation or description of specific economic activities, and between both and a concept of ‘the economy’(with which only the final section will be concerned). By ‘economic analysis’, wrote Joseph Schumpeter, ‘I mean & the intellectual efforts that men have made in order to understand economic phenomena or, which comes to the same thing, & the analytic or scientific aspects of economic thought’. And later, drawing on a suggestion of Gerhard Colm's, he added: ‘economic analysis deals with the questions how people behave at any time and what the economic effects are they produce by so behaving; economic sociology deals with the question how they came to behave as they do 1
