ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the economico-political doctrines in the inherited body of economic thought on their own premises. The general thesis that economic science, if it is to be scientific, should refrain from attempting to establish political norms, has been accepted by leading economists for about a hundred years and is a commonplace to-day. The economic doctrines take their normative aim, their main categories of thought, and their methods of proof from the philosophy of natural law and utilitarianism. The analogy between society and the economy of a patriarchal family had already been developed by Adam Smith. Even he was merely reformulating ancient beliefs which had been systematized in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly by the Cameralists. Nearly all the general terms current in political economy, and in the social sciences generally, have two meanings: one in the sphere of 'what is', and another in the sphere of 'what ought to be'.
