It is often said that there is no precedent to extant fortean transition from totalitarian communism to liberal capitalism. This might well be true. Yet, nascent capitalism is not without historical example. The study of birth of capitalism in feudal Europe may yet lead to some surprising and potentially useful insights.

The Barbarian conquest of teetering Roman Empire (410-476 AD) heralded five centuries of existential insecurity and mayhem. Feudalism was countryside's reaction to this damnation. It was a Hobson's choice and an explicit trade-off. Local lords defended their vassals against nomad intrusions in return for perpetual service bordering on slavery. A small percentage of population lived on trade behind massive walls of Medieval cities.

In most parts of central, eastern and southeastern Europe, feudalism endured well into twentieth century. It was entrenched in legal systems of Ottoman Empire and of Czarist Russia. Elements of feudalism survived in mellifluous and prolix prose of Habsburg codices and patents. Most of denizens of these moribund swathes of Europe were farmers - only profligate and parasitic members of a distinct minority inhabited cities. The present brobdignagian agricultural sectors in countries as diverse as Poland and Macedonia attest to this continuity of feudal practices.

Both manual labour and trade were derided in Ancient World. This derision was partially eroded during Dark Ages. It survived only in relation to trade and other "non-productive" financial activities and even that not past thirteenth century. Max Weber, in his opus, "The City" (New York, MacMillan, 1958) described this mental shift of paradigm thus: "The medieval citizen was on way towards becoming an economic man ... ancient citizen was a political man".

What communism did to lands it permeated was to freeze this early feudal frame of mind of disdain towards "non-productive", "city-based" vocations. Agricultural and industrial occupations were romantically extolled. The cities were berated as hubs of moral turpitude, decadence and greed. Political awareness was made a precondition for personal survival and advancement. The clock was turned back. Weber's "Homo Economicus" yielded to communism's supercilious version of ancient Greeks' "Zoon Politikon". John of Salisbury might as well have been writing for a communist agitprop department when he penned this in "Policraticus" (1159 AD): "...if (rich people, people with private property) have been stuffed through excessive greed and if they hold in their contents too obstinately, (they) give rise to countless and incurable illnesses and, through their vices, can bring about ruin of body as a whole". The body in text being body politic.

To qualify as science, an economic theory must satisfy following conditions:

All-inclusive (anamnetic) – It must encompass, integrate and incorporate all facts known. Coherent – It must be chronological, structured and causal. Consistent – Self-consistent (its sub-"narratives" cannot contradict one another or go against grain of main "narrative") and consistent with observed phenomena (both those related to subject and those pertaining to rest of universe). Logically compatible – It must not violate laws of logic both internally (the narrative must abide by some internally imposed logic) and externally (the Aristotelian logic which is applicable to observable macro world). Insightful – It must inspire a sense of awe and astonishment, which is result of seeing something familiar in a new light or result of seeing a pattern emerging out of a big body of data ("data mining"). The insights must be inevitable conclusion of logic, language and of development of narrative. Aesthetic – The narrative must be both plausible and "right", beautiful (aesthetic), not cumbersome, not awkward, not discontinuous, smooth and so on. Parsimonious – The narrative must employ minimum number of assumptions and entities in order to satisfy all above conditions. Explanatory – The narrative must explain behaviour of economic actors, their decisions, why events develop way they do. Predictive (prognostic) – The narrative must possess ability to predict future events, future behaviour of economic actors and of other meaningful figures and inner emotional and cognitive dynamics of said actors. Prescriptive – With power to induce change (whether it is for better, is a matter of contemporary value judgements and fashions). Imposing – The narrative must be regarded by society as preferable and guiding organizing principle. Elastic – The narrative must possess intrinsic abilities to self organize, reorganize, give room to emerging order, accommodate new data comfortably, avoid rigidity in its modes of reaction to attacks from within and from without. In some of these respects, current economic narratives are usually theories in disguise. But scientific theories must satisfy not only most of above conditions. They must also pass crucial hurdles of testability, verifiability, refutability, falsifiability, and repeatability – all failed by economic theories. Many economists argue that no experiments can be designed to test statements of economic narratives, to establish their truth-value and, thus, to convert them to theorems.

There are five reasons to account for this shortcoming - inability to test hypotheses in economics: