ABSTRACT
The many 'instabilities' created by the War and by post-war vicissitudes, whilst very properly engaging the attention of economists in all countries both as to diagnosis and as to remedial policy, do not, in themselves, present to science any new or startling problems. Capitalism may be stable or not, simply in the sense that it may be expected to last or not. The business man's meaning of stability we have now to translate into the language of theory. The economic system in the sense of conditions and processes reduces itself for the purposes of Theory to a system in the scientific sense of the word, a system, that is, of interdependent quantities, variables and parameters, consisting of quantities of commodities, rates of commodities and prices, mutually determining each other. Economic life, or the economic element in, or aspect of, social life might well be essentially passive and adaptive and therefore, in itself, essentially stable.
