INTRODUCTION

In the move between the analytical and the formalist phases of the market concept, the presentation becomes much more abstract and the argument more technical. It is also where an explicitly mathematical mindset very obviously takes over. It is not as though the analytical market concept lacks mathematical underpinnings, as is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Alfred Marshall’s predecessors tended to provide an algebraic account of market-clearing dynamics before subsequently representing those dynamics pictorially on the forerunners of what is now the classic demand-and-supply diagram. Yet largely at Marshall’s inception the mathematics remained hidden from view (Hart 2012). Instead, the most common way of explaining the market concept in its second phase is using words to describe what the reader can see on the diagram. Becoming familiar with those words is what it takes to learn how to speak in an avowedly “economic” manner, and in this way it is made to look as if an economic logic exists prior to the underlying mathematical structure. In truth, though, this is actually the use of an economic logic to strategically redescribe in economic terms relationships that are already revealed by the underlying mathematical structure. It is as if an attempt is being made to mask how much of the analytical process is produced mathematically. As the market concept reaches its formalist phase all such pretence is dropped (Ackerman & Nadal 2004). This is economics for only the most mathematically gifted, whereby a training in economics, counter-intuitive though it surely sounds, might well be a disadvantage to the academic economist relative to a training in mathematics. Perhaps unsurprisingly in these circumstances, conventional teaching texts in economics venture only tentatively onto the territory occupied by the formalist market concept.