Abstract
Over the past two decades we have witnessed something of a revolution in the natural sciences as thermodynamic thinking evolved from an equilibrium, or ‘classical’, perspective, to a nonequilibrium, or ‘self-organisational’ one. In this transition, thermodynamics has been applied in new ways and in new fields of inquiry. Chemical and biological (evolutionary) processes have been analysed, increasingly, in non-equilibrium thermodynamical terms. Economics has, since the late 19th century, relied heavily upon metaphors and analogies derived from the natural sciences — mechanical analogies cast in terms of traditional Newtonian physics and expressed in terms of Cartesian logic have been especially popular. Thermodynamics, on the other hand, has been less popular, despite its early application in economics by Stanley Jevons, the father of modern notions of utility maximisation in neoclassical economics, and despite its promotion in economic contexts by Paul Samuelson, the author of the definitive treatise upon which post war neoclassical economic theory was based, namely, his Foundations of Economic Analysis.
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© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Burley, P., Foster, J. (1994). Introduction. In: Burley, P., Foster, J. (eds) Economics and Thermodynamics. Recent Economic Thought Series, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8269-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8269-8_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5796-9
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