ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews the history of development economics and refers to two canons of economics with different degrees of abstraction. The first canon came into being with the emergence of physiocracy and English classical political economy, which maintained a high level of abstraction and tried to follow the steps of the natural sciences with their search for eternal laws of nature and human society. The second canon was actually the first to emerge. However, its beginnings did not generally fall within economic science, but rather the art of housekeeping and state administration. The positions of these two canons with regard to economic policy can be char-acterised as activist-idealist, as opposed to passivist-materialist. Development economics as a systematic and specialised discipline originated after the Second World War and with decolonisation, when many new independent states emerged which were obviously underdeveloped in comparison with industrial powers.
