[Adam Smith] severed economic science from politics; he dealt with it as concerned with physical objects and natural laws. To his English predecessors it had been a department of politics or morals; while many of his English successors recognised that in his hands it had become more analogous to physics, and delighted to treat it by the methods of mechanical science.

Cambridge and metropolitan savants, who preferred an ideology of science derived more from Newton than from Bacon. Naive inductivism was replaced by an ideology of method which gave more emphasis to theory, to deduction, and to mathematics. … The effects of these moves, due chiefly to [William] Whewell, were to legitimate the vested career and intellectual interests of certain Cambridge and London savants. … A hierarchy of sciences was proclaimed, with Newtonian astronomy at its head. Deductive and mathematical reasoning was given new importance. The Association's edicts on proper science came increasingly from Trinity College, Cambridge. (Morrell andThackray 1981, 267)