ABSTRACT
The codification of the laws of economics and the reduction of economic activity to a process of scientific precision was an appropriate procedure for the eighteenth century and its successors. The physics of Newton had produced - for Newton's successors at least - a near-mechanistic universe, a cosmic machine, well-oiled, self-acting and, above all, predictable; the laws of economics promised to provide the operating manual for a machine as efficient and as predictable. At the same period the development of new technologies and new techniques made possible a relatively smoothly-operating economic system, a. system in which events were at least theoretically predictable. Life, in general, became more certain; perhaps this, rather than revolutionary social change, or self-sustained growth, should be the epitaph of the age of the industrial revolution.
