ABSTRACT
Economic thinking in the classical period follows a line of development the logic of which is that of the emergence of a scientific conception of economic life. The systematic construction of a scientific idea of the system of economic relations presupposes the process by which the object of the science is displaced from the historically existing forms of wealth, taken in their immediacy as the material for observation and computation. This displacement is a process of abstraction by which the subject-matter of the science is grasped on a theoretical plane. The object of investigation becomes an abstract, therefore theoretical, object and the investigation becomes thereby a scientific investigation. This development involves a conception of the laws by which the wealth of society is governed and a conception of the intrinsic necessity of those laws.
