I had long mulled over a book which would adjudicate the claims made by writers such as Hayek and Friedman identifying a free society with a free economy. The idea was to extract the kernel of truth and to say in what respects they were right or wrong. Previously I had put off the endeavour as too daunting. But I was impelled into the breach by the hysterical media reaction to the first overt Conservative flirtation with market-based policies. This related not to the Thatcher government but to the Heath government of 1970-4 in its first 'Selsdon' phase. The Selsdon Park hotel was where Conservative leaders met privately before the 1970 election campaign and afterwards briefed political reporters in an abrasively pro-market fashion. The phase lasted until the celebrated U-turn towards pay and price controls and industrial intervention, following the Heath Government's alarm at rising unemployment and the loss of the first miners' strike in early 1972.

I tried to introduce an empirical content into my projected work on the market economy by an attitude survey among economists. I had seen multiple-choice questions for students in which, to take one example, the correct answer to a question about below-cost housing for the poor was that it was less efficient than direct social security payments because it will result in 'too much housing and too little of the other things consumers want'. If this statement - so opposed to everything that Labour MPs preached - really did represent an economic consensus, then this would not only be powerful ammunition but would also show that there was a distinctive economic view of public policy different from that of politicians, journalists or other educated laymen. In the end the survey was published separately as another slim volume (Brittan 1973b).

Since I was subsequently asked by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) to write a preface to a much larger survey of economists' opinions published in 1990 it is illuminating to take the two surveys together (Brittan 1990b). Both did show a kind of economic orthodoxy embodied in a belief in competitive markets, use of the price mechanism and cash redistribution of income. The outlook was also pretty Keynesian in the English postwar sense of believing that demand management affected output and employment and that fiscal policy made a big difference here.

In both surveys the majority of respondents took every opportunity to show that they were opposed to anything like a minimal state approach, to endorse the slogan of more equality and to reject cuts in government spending. There was something goody-goody in the economists' attitudes. In 1973 the approved correct answer, given by a large majority, was that a freely operating market system could perform efficiently even in Communist countries. Some doubts might have occurred to economists even in the early 1970s if they had been more familiar with works on the economics of property rights or public choice.

One of Margaret Thatcher's most popular remarks may have been when she intervened in a 'Yes, Minister' television programme to say that all government economists should, without exception, be sacked. Tempting though it would be to agree, generalized attacks on the economics profession amount almost to a category mistake. For if all economists were put painlessly to sleep, human curiosity about matters such as the wealth of nations, booms and slumps, or why some people are rich and others poor would remain, and the profession would re-emerge.

What has gone wrong with economics is the overemphasis on technique as opposed to underlying ideas. Perhaps the time has come for a less strenuous insistence on economics as a hard science. Most of the core economic doctrines about the gains from international trade, analysis of opportunity costs, and the linking of prices to costs to allocate resources are neither falsifiable propositions nor just political value judgements. They are ways of looking at the world. Economists do not need to pose as ersatz physicists. Philosophers and literary critics know more about their subjects than lay outsiders without their being in a position to supply authoritative answers; and economists may be nearer to them than they are to physicists or mathematicians.

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