Paul Sweezy addressed the subject in The Theory of Capitalist Development, chapter one
section one The Use of Abstraction. I will try to summarize some of his points (my
comments in brackets):
Marx was a strong adherent of the abstract-deductive method which was such a marked
characteristic of
Jayson Funke quoted Sweezy:
Marx was a strong adherent of the abstract-deductive method which was
such a marked characteristic of the Ricardian school... Marx believed
in and practiced what modern theorists have called the method of
'successive approximations,' which consists in moving from the
