ABSTRACT
A question seems to elude the grasp of modern economists, or rather to escape their interest: what is economics? In an impatient way, of course, we all know the conventional answers. Economics is ‘the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life’, as Marshall put it; or it is ‘maximizing subject to constraints’, as the mainstream of methodology from John Stuart Mill through Lord Robbins would have it; or perhaps it is the ‘practice’ of praxiology, as von Mises would insist. But if the question is pressed harder, these conventional answers lose their self-evident authority. What is the ‘ordinary’ business of life? Maximizing what, how? Are commissars praxiologists? Pressing the question home this way leads to the uneasy suspicion that we do not know exactly what economics is.
