Dear Dr. Ahiakpor,

Thank you very much for your comments!

I feel that his "heroic abstraction" hides something; forgive me if I seem hesitant, but I haven't a solid opinion about it yet.

I think his way of arguing hides something more profound about how we see the world, notwithstanding his "misleading imagination for what the classical and (early) neoclassical monetary analysis really was". 

Of the many thinkers you've mentioned, two passages came most readily to my mind.

Mill's passage on the "Principles". "There cannot... be intrinsically a more insignificant thing, in the economy of society, than money; except in the character of a contrivance..." (Collected Works, Vol. 3, Chapter on "Money", p. 45). Friedman cited it half approvingly in "The role of monetary policy" (1968).

And Pigou's "Money, a Veil?" in which goes to some length arguing, ambiguously, for and against the idea of the monetary veil (It's included in the book edited by Clower).

Just last week, I came across an interesting paper by Hicks (read at the London Economic Club in 1934) in which he said he only got "interested in money because he could not keep it out of his non-money problems" (Critical Essays in Monetary Theory, 1967, p. 61).

I agree with you that classical and (early) neoclassical thinkers did not think we live forever or that we're "perfect competitors", and their thinking about money seems more interesting than that of monetarists. At least they seem richer, as far as I can see. Nonetheless, the classical and (early) neoclassical economists seemed less able to give a coherent account of an economy where production takes money (or credit) as a precondition and, as a result. The reasons why they were" supposedly" less able would make for an interesting discussion, even if a tangential one.

What I'm trying to get at is "given the world has some basic ontological features and economists interpret them radically differently", it's therefore complicated for them to agree (here, I'm thinking about different schools of thought). The background for this thought is Critical Realism's discussion about ontology an epistmology - Roy Bhaskar's "Critical Realism", "A Realist Theory of Science", and many other works.

What about Samuelson's "heroic abstraction"?
I read it as the only escape route he found to equate two distinct ways of thinking about the economy. Two different interpretations of the world's ontological features - the most important being the monetary nature of production. The older way of thinking about the economy came directly from "there cannot... be intrinsically a more insignificant thing than money". The other, newer one, came from Keynes's "monetary economy", and all of that against the backdrop of the general equilibrium theory.

I apologise if my ideas seem not fully thought through, but these are matters that I'm still figuring out.

Felipe Sousa