Economics as Social Theory

Series edited by Tony Lawson

University of Cambridge

Social Theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies, and of the types of method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects, are re-emerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure, between economy and the rest of society, and between the enquirer and the object of enquiry. There is a renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, competition, culture, discrimination, evolution, money, need, order, organization, power probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty, value etc.

The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary economics the label “theory” has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical “modelling”. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the “Theory” label, offering a platform for alternative rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorizing.

Other titles in this series include:

  1.  Economics and Language

Edited by Willie Henderson

  2.  Rationality, Institutions and Economic Methodology

Edited by Uskali Mäki, Bo Gustafsson, and Christian Knudsen

  3.  New Directions in Economic Methodology

Edited by Roger Backhouse

  4.  Who Pays for the Kids?

Nancy Folbre

  5.  Rules and Choice in Economics

Viktor Vanberg

  6.  Beyond Rhetoric and Realism in Economics

Thomas A. Boylan and Paschal F. O’Gorman

  7.  Feminism, Objectivity and Economics

Julie A. Nelson

  8.  Economic Evolution

Jack J. Vromen

  9.  Economics and Reality

Tony Lawson

10.  The Market

John O’ Neill

11.  Economics and Utopia

Geoff Hodgson

12.  Critical Realism in Economics

Edited by Steve Fleetwood

13.  The New Economic Criticism

Edited by Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteeen

14.  What do Economists Know?

Edited by Robert F. Garnett, Jr.

15.  Postmodernism, Economics and Knowledge

Edited by Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio

16.  The Values of Economics

An Aristotelian perspective

Irene van Staveren

17.  How Economics Forgot History

The problem of historical specificity in social science

Geoffrey M. Hodgson

18.  Intersubjectivity in Economics

Agents and structures

Edward Fullbrook

19.  The World of Consumption

The material and cultural revisited 2nd edn

Ben Fine

20.  Reorienting Economics

Tony Lawson

21.  Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics

Edited by Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper

22.  The Crisis in Economics

Edited by Edward Fullbrook

23.  The Philosophy of Keynes’ Economics

Probability, uncertainty and convention

Edited by Jochen Runde and Sohei Mizuhara

24.  Postcolonialism Meets Economics

Edited by Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela

25.  The Evolution of Institutional Economics

Agency, structure and Darwinism in American institutionalism

Geoffrey M. Hodgson

26.  Transforming Economics

Perspectives on the Critical Realist Project

Edited by Paul Lewis

27.  New Departures in Marxian Theory

Edited by Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff

28.  Markets, Deliberation and Environmental Value

John O’Neill

29.  Speaking of Economics

How to get in the conversation

Arjo Klamer

30.  From Political Economy to Economics

Method, the social and the historical in the evolution of economic theory

Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine

31.  From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics

The shifting boundaries between economics and other social sciences

Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine

32.  Development and Globalization

A Marxian class analysis

David Ruccio

33.  Introducing Money

Mark Peacock

34.  The Cambridge Revival of Political Economy

Nuno Ornelas Martins

35.  Understanding Development Economics

Its challenge to development studies

Adam Fforde

36.  Economic Methodology

An historical introduction

Harro Maas, Translated by Liz Waters

37.  Social Ontology and Modern Economics

Stephen Pratten

38.  History of Financial Crises

Dreams and follies of expectations

Cihan Bilginsoy

39.  Commerce and Community

Ecologies of social cooperation

Edited by Robert F. Garnett, Jr., Paul Lewis and Lenore T. Ealy