ABSTRACT
Schumpeter, in his massive and erudite History of Economic Analysis, assesses economists according to both their analytical competence and their ‘vision’. The latter is defined in a number of places, most succinctly in the following terms:
In every scientific venture, the thing that comes first is vision…. before embarking upon analytical work of any kind we must first single out the set of phenomena we wish to investigate and acquire ‘intuitively’ a preliminary notion of how they hang together … in practice we mostly do not start from a vision of our own but from the work of our predecessors or from ideas that float in the public mind.
(Schumpeter 1954: 561–2) 1