Before the first equation is drawn, before the diagram takes shape or the dataset is loaded, something quieter — and more profound — happens in the mind of the economist.
A vision forms.
It is not yet a theory, not even a framework. It is a way of seeing — a lens through which reality is filtered, simplified, organized. It determines which facts matter and which are discarded. It hints at causes, at consequences. It whispers what kind of world we believe we live in.
This is the beginning of economic theorising. And it is here, in what Joseph Schumpeter called the pre-analytic cognitive act, that the most important choices are made — often unconsciously.
In The Wealth of Ideas, Alessandro Roncaglia lifts this hidden process into view. He reminds us that economics is not just a machine of models, but a chain of stages — beginning with conceptualisation and only later arriving at model-building. To confuse one for the other is not only an intellectual error. It is a philosophical blindness.
Stage One: The Quiet Birth of a Worldview
To theorise is to abstract. But to abstract is to select. And to select, one must already hold a vision of what is essential and what is noise.
In the first stage of theorising, the economist does not write — they see. They sift through the chaos of life and choose: this is the agent; this is the environment; this is the mechanism that matters.
Smith saw a moral universe of sympathy and trade. Ricardo saw classes and surplus. Keynes saw uncertainty and animal spirits. Each began not with a formula, but with a question: What kind of economy are we living in?
This stage is conceptual. Philosophical. Even poetic.
It is also dangerous.
Because it happens in the background, many economists do not recognize it as theory at all. They inherit the vision embedded in the textbooks, unexamined. They speak in the language of models without asking who wrote the grammar.
Roncaglia warns: The meaning of a concept, even if it carries the same name, can change entirely between theories. Price. Value. Rationality. Equilibrium. These are not universal constants. They are expressions of deeper commitments — to the individual or the collective, to scarcity or production, to harmony or conflict.
To understand an economic theory, one must first understand its conceptual soul.
Stage Two: From Vision to Mechanism
Only once the vision has taken shape does model-building begin.
This is where mathematics enters — not as a tyrant, but as a tool. The economist formalizes assumptions, defines variables, and traces outcomes. The model becomes a microcosm — a purified space where the logic of the vision can play out without interruption.
Done well, models are beautiful. They clarify, discipline, and illuminate.
But they are only as honest as the concepts they encode.
This is why Roncaglia insists that model-building cannot be divorced from conceptualisation. The two stages are not separable tasks assigned to different minds. They are a spiral — each shaping and reshaping the other.
When the model fails to describe the world, it is tempting to adjust the math. But often, the problem lies deeper — in the initial vision that was never made explicit, never questioned.
The risk is subtle but serious: we become technicians of systems we do not understand.
The Hidden Curriculum
Modern economics, especially in its mainstream forms, tends to treat model-building as the core of the discipline. The more advanced the math, the closer we are to the frontier.
But this prioritization comes at a cost: the first stage of theorising is neglected, even erased.
Students are trained to solve, not to see. They learn to manipulate symbols, but not to ask where those symbols came from — or whether they should be there at all. The deeper questions are outsourced to the history of thought, if they are asked at all.
This is a profound narrowing of the economist’s craft.
For when conceptualisation is abandoned, so too is creativity. Without it, we cannot adapt to new realities, cannot build new paradigms. We are left polishing models that no longer speak to the world they were meant to explain.
Returning to First Questions
To recover conceptualisation is not to reject models, but to deepen them. It is to reintroduce into economics the awareness that every theory is a story about the world — and every story has an author.
It is also to reclaim agency.
If we acknowledge that our models are rooted in visions, then we can choose to change them. We can build theories that reflect different values, different possibilities. We can bring in ethics, institutions, psychology, history — not as appendices, but as constitutive elements of the economic.
We can once again see the economist not just as a technician, but as a thinker — someone who crafts worlds, who makes the invisible visible.
A Slow Art
Theorising, at its best, is not an assembly line. It is an art of slowness — of seeing, selecting, building, revising.
It asks not only, What does the model predict? but also, What does it assume? What does it ignore? What world does it describe — and is it the world we live in?
In a time of rapid change — ecological, technological, political — we need more than models. We need vision.
We need economists willing to return to the first stage. To question their concepts. To trace the genealogy of their assumptions. To imagine economies that have not yet been drawn.
Because before every model is a metaphor. Before every equation, a choice.
And to make better models, we must begin again — by learning how to see.