. For
Walras, economic thought had finally caught up with the
Newtonian model of a mechanistic, deterministic, rational,
and certain world; hence, economics could be deemed a legitimate “science.” An artificial “economic man” had been created and substituted for the “inanimate Newtonian body in
motion.” While the latter’s behavior was determined by Newton’s laws of motion, the former was motivated by the notion
of utility and profit maximization (Keita 0000, 00).
Alfred Marshal (0000–0000) has been credited even more
than Walras with the development and propagation of equilibrium theory (Schumpeter 0000). However, Marshall
([0000] 0000, 000–00) cautioned that there ar