ABSTRACT
Economists experienced the influence of the new atmosphere as they had experienced that of early liberalism and as they were to experience, in our day, that of socialism. In all these cases this meant not only or even primarily new facts and problems but also new attitudes and (extra-scientific) creeds 2 and hence, for a time at least, revolt against those restraints which in each epoch, as it wears on and as initial enthusiasms cool, the men who are engaged in the work of analysis find it necessary to impose upon themselves. The ‘mercantilist’ writers had not discovered that there was anything for an economist to do except to propose measures and fight for them; the economists of the ‘liberal’ age were at first in no better state, though they eventually did discover the difference between a theorem and a recommendation; and the economists of the period under discussion, yielding to what the reader may call either temptation or the call of duty, similarly deviated from the stony path that leads to scientific conquest.
