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