The inescapable abstraction of economic analysis has indeed caused political
economy and economics to become "an arcane discipline for quite a long
time". In 1832 the Eclectic Review could remind its readers that the work
of Malthus and Ricardo "had tended to lead the public far away from the true
path of inquiry", and to make of political economy "a hideous chain of
paradoxes at apparent war with religion and humanity."
Anthony Waterman