Invisible Hand in the Process of Making Economics or on the Method and Scope of Economics

Abstract

As a social science, economics cannot be reduced to simply an a priori science or an ideology. In addition economics cannot be solely an empirical or a historical science. Economics is a research field which studies only one dimension of human behavior, with the four fields of mathematics, econometrics, ethics and history intersecting one another. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the two parts of the proposition above, in connection with the controversies surrounding the method and the scope of economics: economics as an applied mathematics and economics as a predictive/empirical science.

Key words: Invisible hand, Scope and method in economics, Economics as an applied mathematics, Economics as an empirical science, Economics as ideology.
JEL: B41, B23.