ABSTRACT
Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked, ‘The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are as if one were to try to classify clouds by their shape.’ We do not pretend, of course, to know whether this is a fair assessment of the situation in the disciplines mentioned. We rather ask whether it would be true if it were applied to economics. More particularly, we ask whether classifying economic ideas in distinct analytical approaches to certain economic problems and even in different schools of economic thought is a futile enterprise. The title of this book implies that we think that it is not. We are especially convinced that there is a thing that may, for good reasons, be called ‘classical’ economics, which is distinct from other kinds of economics, in particular ‘neoclassical’ economics.
