What is the nature of the intellectual enterprise - general equilibrium analysis - that so many economists regard as the centerpiece of their discipline? In this book, Roy Weintraub considers both the modern history of the analysis, and the methodological puzzles that it, and mathematical economic theory in general, pose. Professor Weintraub argues that previous writings on the history and method of general equilibrium theory have been curiously biased and misleading. He provides a clear and careful presentation of the development (...) of the theory from the 1930s through to the Arrow-Debreu work of the 1950s. This historical analysis is the centre of the book: a case study which permits the author to justify the status of general equilibrium theory in economics and the activity in which economic theorists engage. He argues that previous methodological investigations have been distorted by their use of inappropriate models taken from the philosophy of science that were developed to appraise work in the physical sciences. (shrink)

This volume consists of essays from a colloquium about "philosophy of economics" held at the·University of l1unich in July, 1981. They are contributions to an enterprise which in some respects is long-standing and in other respects is new. The long-standing enterprise is to somehow establish decision theory and its kindred disciplines as the basis of economic theory from which its other parts might be shown to follow. The new enterprise is to apply (some of) the latest methods of phi. losophy (...) of science to economic theory. By "philosophy of science" we do not mean h:istory of science and the like; rather we mean a reconstructive proce dure which clarifies and deepens the understanding of the science under investigation. By "the latest methods" we refer to the structuralist view which has emerged in the last fifteen years, and which has been success fully applied most notably to physical theories. Economics being rather like a stepchild of a reconstructivist philo sophy of science, we think much of the interest of this volume to lie just in its attending to the newer enterprise_ We are happy to have brought together at the colloquium some of the few philosophers of scien ce working in. this field who share this common goal, and we hope that their essays will stimulate further work. -The contributions to the long-standing enterprise, though perhaps not as urgent, are no less valuable. (shrink)

This is the basis of the first part of the book.