ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a range of interpretations of this relationship that were underlying economic theories in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. David Ricardo, Jean Baptiste Say and their followers regarded the laws of economics not only as laws, which were similar to natural laws, they also supposed that the social and economic laws could be derived directly from the laws of Nature. During the nineteenth century Karl Marx was, perhaps, the most important critic of the naive naturalism of the classical political economy. Adam Smith considered political economy a human science. The vision of the relationship between facts and thought changes completely after the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution. The double movement can be personified as the action of two organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself specific institutional aims, having the support of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods.
