Current affairs in politics and views on morality affect the way people perceive the economy thus changes in the foundations of economical ontology are possible.

The is study of economic ontology concerned with what may be called 'the economic realm: the economic realm consists of those parts or aspects of the universe which are set apart as constituting the subject matter of economics. We may think of the economic realm as being distinguished from other realms (the physical realm, the biotic realm, the realm of aesthetics) by virtue of being composed of certain types of entities or properties - such as 'that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing' (Marshall 1920, p. 1) or 'human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses' (Robbins 1935, p. 16). This suggests that the economic realm has definite boundaries which separate it from other realms. On the other hand, the history of the discipline suggests that such boundaries are not completely sharp and fixed and that there are rival and evolving perceptions of how to draw them. The contents and confines of the economic realm are 'essentially contestable' as a popular phrase has it, and they change along with the rest of the discipline of economics (see Kirzner 1976). The question then arises whether the varying circumscrip-tions of the economic realm are endeavours to discover something about the objective constitution of the world, or whether they are subjective impositions of structure on the social world. The economic realm is connected to other realms in various ways. The possibility of the existence of the economic realm presupposes the existence of the physical, the biotic, and the psychic realms. How exactly this dependence is to be characterized is itself an ontological issue; is it a matter of reduction, or supervenience, or is some sort of emergence involved? The functioning of the economic realm is shaped by the realms of morality and politics. The exact character of this dependence - and the question whether the realms of morality and politics are made of stuff that is different from that of the economic realm - are likewise among some of the major ontological issues related to economics. We may say that the justification of the discipline of economics requires a claim to relative autonomy, but this does not yet give us a precise idea of what such autonomy amounts to. The contents and confines of the economic realm are suggested by the ontological commitments that economists hold. A set of such commitments has the nature of a Weltanschauung, a fundamental world view with a focus on a selection of economically relevant aspects of the world. Joseph Schumpeter (1954) used the word 'vision' to capture very much the same idea. There is a sense in which those commitments have a foundational status: they are more fundamental than other elements in one's belief system in that they are not as easily corrigible and that they are presupposed rather than derived by the reasoning within the belief system. The ontological commitments have the character of absolute presuppositions as R. G. Collingwood called them. He viewed them as the ultimate and unquestioned presuppositions in terms of which all the relative suppositions are to be justified (Collingwood 1940). Ludwig Wittgenstein called them hinges on which our ordinary thoughts and judgements turn, and the riverbed within which our thought flows (Wittgenstein 1969, S$97-9, 341-3). Adopting a metaphor from constitutional economics, we may also view the ontological commitments as providing part of the constitutional framework of a belief system. In this spirit, James Buchanan refers to elements of a research programme which are rarely, if ever, challenged by those scholars who work inside the intellectual tradition . These central elements are taken as pre-suppositions, as relatively absolute absolutes, and, as such, they become, themselves, the constraints (the constitution) within which the scientific discourse is conducted' (Buchanan 1991, pp. 13-14). Thus there is something basic or fundamental about the ontological presuppositions in our belief systems.