ABSTRACT
The introduction and development of neoclassical economics has been studied from the point of view of the widespread incorporation of metaphors from physics and the elevation of mathematics as its language. The metaphors drawn from nineteenth-century energetics and based on the First Law of Thermodynamics1 were decisive for the formal extension of the general equilibrium models and for the acceptance of the heuristic relevance of the maximisation principle, as well as all its paraphernalia of concepts and postulates (Mirowski, 1989a). Yet, the impact of statistical mechanics and the following combination of neoclassical economics and the new generation of econometric models, research and institutions, which are the subject of this book and which provided the decisive step towards the contemporarily dominant form of economic theorising, has not been studied in the same depth.
