 In the wake of the work of  Kuhn  (1970) and Lakatos (1970), philosophers are much more aware of and interested in the larger theoretical structures that unify and guide research within particular research traditions. Since many theoretical projects or approaches in economics are systematically unified, they pose questions about what guides research, and many economists have applied the work of Kuhn or Lakatos in the attempt to shed light on the overall structure of economics (Baumberg 1977, Blaug 1976, de Marchi and Blaug 1991, Bronfenbrenner 1971, Coats 1969, Dillard 1978, Hands 1985b, Hausman 1992, ch. 6, Hutchison 1978, Latsis 1976, Jalladeau 1978, Kunin and Weaver 1971, Stanfield 1974, Weintraub 1985, Worland 1972). Whether these applications have been successful is controversial, but the comparison of the structure of economics to Kuhn’s and Lakatos’ schema served to highlight distinctive features of economics and may have contributed to some of the changes that economics has undergone. For example, asking what the “positive heuristic” of mainstream economics consists in permits one to see that mainstream theoretical models typically attempted to demonstrate that an economic equilibrium will obtain, and thus that mainstream models were unified in more than just their common assumptions. Since the success of research projects in economics is controversial, understanding their global structure and strategy helped to clarify their drawbacks as well as their advantages.