Over the span of one hundred and fifty years, dissatisfaction with one or more of the fundamental postulates of theoretical economics has given impetus to the development of new “theoretical” sciences. Depending upon one’s viewpoint, scientific socialism, sociology, institutional economics, and so on may represent several such attempts, or they may represent a single multifaceted effort. Whichever the case, the order of procedure in such undertakings is straightforward. The invention of a new theoretical social science can be accomplished by rejecting or otherwise vacating one of the basic postulates of theoretical economics.
A successful effort promises to ground a new science and reduce economics to the status of special case —with a single thrust. The following will outline such an attempt rather narrowly with respect to the methodology of “Durkheimian” sociology, proceeding thence to a discussion of the paralyzing influence it continues to wield in a discipline which has seldom bothered to question its theoretical foundations.
