Time, Conceptual Structures and Economic Schools of Thought

Abstract

In Chapter 4 we began our discussion of time in economic analysis, and commented that so far economics had little success in coping with time in its full ‘historical’ sense. In Chapter 5 we showed that concepts of time irreversibility had already been encountered in natural science, and we suggested ways that lessons for social science could be learnt from this encounter. Our aim in this chapter is to examine various schools of economic thought, in terms of various conceptual elements, and to show how notions of time and time irreversibility fit into this framework.