It is always difficult to appraise current research in an area, especially in a technical area, for a non-specialist. Recent work on problems associated with the microfoundations of macroeconomics present severe difficulties since the literature is intrinsically integrative, albeit abstract. The particular set of abstractions, or models, have their roots in the separate concerns of microeconomists, general equilibrium theorists, macroeconomists, and monetary theorists and as such cannot be fully appreciated without a sense of how these areas have developed and interacted up to the present time.

In a discipline like economics, where progress can be identified with sequences of models each successively better suited to the current issues, but each always developing from a predecessor, an understanding of what is “modern” requires too an understanding of what is no longer “modern.”

The basic structure of Part I represents what must be an imperfect attempt to trace the development and interlocking nature of two scientific research programs (in the sense of Lakatos), macroeconomic theory and (general equilibrium) neo-Walrasian theory. Since much that is currently being done in the various microfoundations literatures can be identified as the symbiosis of these two programs, their separate developments should be part of the mental baggage of modern economists.

In Chapter 1, then, a case is built that the set of problems being considered ramifies in a multitude of ways into the daily thinking of professional economists who believe themselves quite free of, and apart from, the arcane concerns of mathematical economists.