ABSTRACT
Whether in absolute terms or by comparison across the social sciences, economics is an extraordinary discipline by a number of criteria. First, it is astonishingly ignorant of its own history and traditions. As if to prove as well as to proclaim the point, long ago David Gordon (1965:123-126) argued that:
[Adam] Smith’s postulate of the maximizing individual in a relatively free market and the successful application of this postulate to a wide variety of specific questions is our basic paradigm. It created a “coherent scientific tradition” (most notably including Marx) and its persistence can be seen by skimming the most current periodicals . . . I conclude that economic theory is much like a normal science and that, like a normal science, it finds no necessity for including its history as a part of professional training.
