Rediscovering economic policy as a discipline

After a decades-long gestation period, economic policy finally emerged as an autonomous discipline in the 1950s. It was founded on two pillars: the logic of economic policy, dealing with the development of democratic policy choices in the event of market failures; the theory of economic policy, focusing on ways of obtaining optimal policy plans. The paper investigates the critical assessments made of both pillars and a present-day analysis which fully validates these components parts.