Deductive reasoning about social phenomena invited the use of mathematics from the first ...

economics was in a privileged position to respond to this invitation, for two of its centralconcepts,
commodity and price, are quantified in a unique manner, as soon as units of measurement are
chosen ... The differential calculus and linear algebra were applied to that [commodity-price] space
as a matter of course.The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the deployment of mathematical
expression in economic discourse enjoyed neither an inexorable nor unhindered progress, but rather
was characterized by two primary ruptures in the history of economic thought,episodes marking the
inflection points in the rise of mathematical discourse.How can the historical indifference of
economists be squared with the above assertions of Debreu that price and quantity are naturally
quantitative terms, and that the application of the differential calculus should have been naturally
applied as a matter of course?

The one thing which links together all the mathematical writers prior to the neoclassical is the
admission, grudging or no, that the failure of analogy between rational mechanics and the price
system was so pervasive and that their own precursors' versions were so flawed that this research
program had yet to attain a state of cumulative self-assured internal development.This situation
changed dramatically after the middle of the nineteenth century, which provides the first major
discontinuity in the history of mathematical economics.

Hence the key to the rise of neoclassical economics, which is coextensive with the institution of the
first ongoing program of mathematical economics, is not the fact that an analogy was drawn from
physical theory—all precursors ofmathematical economics engaged in that endeavor—but rather
that a critical mass of theorists each (independently or not) adopted the same mathematical
metaphor.was widespread resistance if not outright hostility towards the core neoclassical tenet of a
social mechanics, which was often associated with the phenomenon of mathematical economics.

Thus, mathematical discourse occupied only a tenuous position within economics in the half-century
or so after the rise of neoclassical economics.The second quantum leap in the application of
mathematical discourse to economic theory may be dated with somewhat more precision in the
decade 1925–35.Taking the Measure of Man and His Commodities.If this be the case, then the
argument becomes stronger that the mathematicization of economic discourse should not be traced
to the natural quantification of commodities, but rather should be explained empirically by changing
social perceptions of the symmetries and invariances read into market activities through the
instrumentality of social institutions.

In this view, the reason that modern economic actors express prices as ratios is that the following
regularities arebeing projected onto their quotidian exchange activities: (1) The commodity
preserves its identity through the exchange process; (2) Buying nothing should cost nothing; (3) The
order in which items are presented for purchase should not influence the amount paid in the
aggregate; (4) Dividing the aggregate into subsets and paying for each separately should not
influence the sum paid; (5) The net result of buying an item and then returning it should be zero; (6)
Everyone should pay the same price for the same item.cally evolved to the point where these six
principles reify the impersonal character of appropriation.Such considerations lead to a very
different conception of the role ofmathematics in the history of economic discourse than that found
in previous discussions.

Here, history and mathematics, so often regarded as polar opposites in economic discourse, are
united in a single narrative, albeit one far removed from the neoclassical penchant to root social
relations in