Carl Menger
The Austrian School, beginning with the work of Carl Menger in the 1860s, argued against this (in "Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre", English title: "Principles of Economics"), that economics was the work of philosophical logic and could only ever be about developing rules from first principles — seeing human motives and social interaction as far too complex to be amenable to statistical analysis — and purporting to deduce universally valid precepts from human actions.