ABSTRACT

The question of the role of authority in economics has been unduly neglected in the past, but it has not been entirely ignored, as the following pages will reveal. In particular, it was systematically examined in one chapter of W.H.Hutt’s The Economists and the Public.1 But Hutt, as his title suggests, was chiefly concerned with the relationships between the economists and the community at large, rather than with the function of authority within the community of scholars, and his account was, in any case, so preoccupied with the defence of ‘orthodox’ economics and the political and ethical premises and implications of that doctrine, that it can scarcely be regarded as a satisfactory presentation of the main issues.