Restabilizing Dynamics: Construction and Constraint in the History of Walrasian Stability Theory

Abstract

InStabilizing Dynamics(1991) Roy Weintraub provides a history of stability theory from the work of Hicks and Samuelson in the late 1930s to the Gale and Scarf counterexamples in the 1960s. Unlike his earlier work in the history of general equilibrium theory (1979, 1985, 1988) this recent contribution is not an attempt to fit the Walrasian program into the narrow framework of some particular philosophy of natural science (such as Lakatos's methodology of scientific research programs). Rather, the theme inStabilizing Dynamicsis broadly social constructivist. Simply put, the constructivist view of science is “that scientific knowledge itself is constructed socially, in communities of scientists: Knowledge is constructed, not found” (p. 9).