ABSTRACT
When English political economy became sophisticated, in the generation following Ricardo, the practice began of asking what conditions the orthodox theories of value and distribution took for granted. The subtler critics of still later years have looked less for logical postulates than for preconceptions—convictions that shape the general trend of a man's thinking without being themselves submitted to critical scrutiny. The search for postulates was a lead that yielded large returns at the beginning, but soon ran out. It suffers two limitations. First, one can no more list all the postulates of an economic doctrine than one can list all the causes of a physical phenomenon. The second difficulty in listing postulates is that the logical implications of an economic doctrine depend upon the strictness with which it is taken. And the degree of precision attributed to these doctrines varies with the doctrine, the expositor, and his purpose, not to say his mood.
