For most of history, economics did not have a separate identity apart from social thought in general. Even as late as the eighteenth century, Adam Smith viewed economics as a subset of jurisprudence. This makes the search for fIrst principles of economic reasoning more difficult, not because the intellectual cupboard of antiquity was bare, but because the subject boundaries between the social sciences were blurred. Economics attained its distinctive identity when it came to be identified with a self-regulating market process, and the discovery of the market as a self-regulating process was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. However, the seeds of economic analysis were sown long before, in ancient Greece, the cradle of Western civilization.
