Behind the invisible hand of the market lies the visible hand of politics. Instead of pursuing timeless laws and models, we ought to study events in their time-bound context. We need to study the process of change itself. There has been a widespread recognition, both among the economists and the general public, that economic theory has failed. I believe that the failure is more profound than generally recognized. It goes back to the very foundations of economic theory. Economics try to imitate Newton's physics. It's so to establish universally and timelessly valid laws governing reality. But economics is a social science, and there is a fundamental difference between natural and social sciences. Social phenomena have thinking participants who raise their decisions on imperfect knowledge. That is what economics has tried to ignore. Natural phenomena consist of facts that occur independently of what anybody says. Social sciences by contrasts have thinking participants who have a will of their own. People face their decisions not on knowledge, but on an inherently biased and to a lesser extent distorted interpretation. Economics became the most influential of the social sciences, so to remove this handicap by taking an axiomatic approach similar to Euclid's geometry. But Euclid's axioms closely resemble reality. On the one hand, people seek to understand the situation. That's the cognitive function. The other, they try to make an impact. I call that the causative or manipulative function. The two functions connect the thinking agents and the situations in which they participate in opposite directions. In the cognitive function, the situation is supposed to determine the participants' views. In the causative function, the participants' views are supposed to determine the outcome. When both functions work at the same time, they interfere with each other. The two functions form a circular relationship or feedback loop. I call that reflexivity. In a reflexive situation, participants' views can't correspond to reality, because reality is not something independently given, it's contingent on the participants' views and decisions. The decisions, in turn, can't be based on knowledge alone. They must contain some element of bias or guesswork about the future, because the future is contingent on the participants' decisions. The future can't be known until it has actually occurred. The idea that laws or models of universal validity can predict the future has to be abandoned.