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.
By John O'Neill
December 26, 2006
What is the source of our environmental problems? Why is there in modern societies a persistent tendency to environmental damage? From within neoclassical economic theory there is a straightforward answer to those questions: it is because environmental goods and harms are unpriced. They come free....
By Tony Lawson
April 18, 2003
Contemporary economics is characterized by a mismatch between its methods of analysis and the nature of the world it seeks to interpret. Despite regular economic crises and ongoing critique of the discipline, the drift from political economy into applied mathematics appears to continue ...
By David F. Ruccio
November 04, 2010
Since the mid-1980s, David F. Ruccio has been developing a new framework of Marxian class analysis and applying it to various issues in socialist planning, Third World development, and capitalist globalization. The aim of this collection is to show, through a series of concrete examples, how ...
By Ben Fine, Dimitris Milonakis
June 05, 2009
Is or has economics ever been the imperial social science? Could or should it ever be so? These are the central concerns of this book. It involves a critical reflection on the process of how economics became the way it is, in terms of a narrow and intolerant orthodoxy, that has, nonetheless, ...
By Dimitris Milonakis, Ben Fine
December 09, 2008
Economics has become a monolithic science, variously described as formalistic and autistic with neoclassical orthodoxy reigning supreme. So argue Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine in this new major work of critical recollection. The authors show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional ...
By Arjo Klamer
April 18, 2007
Making sense of economists and their world in a persuasive and entertaining style, Arjo Klamer, the author of a number of influential books including Conversation with Economists and The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, shows that economics is as much about how people interact as it is about the ...
By Stephen Resnick, Richard Wolff
July 25, 2006
Over the last twenty-five years, Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff have developed a groundbreaking interpretation of Marxian theory generally and of Marxian economics in particular. This book brings together their key contributions and underscores their different interpretations. In facing ...
Edited
By Martha Woodmansee, Mark Osteen
May 05, 1999
This collection brings together twenty-seven essays by influential literary and cultural historians, as well as representatives of the vanguard of postmodernist economics. Contributors include: Jean-Joseph Goux, Marc Shell. This is a pathbreaking work which develops a new form of economic analysis....
Edited
By Paul Lewis
December 16, 2004
Economics has become polarised. On the one hand there is a body of economists who concern themselves with progressing their discipline via an increasing use of mathematical modelling. On the other hand, there are economists who believe passionately that in order for economics to be useful it needs ...
By Geoffrey M Hodgson
April 16, 2004
This exciting new book from Geoffrey Hodgson is eagerly awaited by social scientists from many different backgrounds. This book charts the rise, fall and renewal of institutional economics in the critical, analytical and readable style that Hodgson's fans have come to know and love, and that a new ...
Edited
By Edward Fullbrook
December 07, 2001
Traditional economics treats the defining subjective properties of economic agents (tastes, preferences, demands, goals and perceptions) as if they are determined independently of individual and collective relations with other agents. This collection of essays reflects the increasingly common view ...
Edited
By Sohei Mizuhara, Jochen Runde
July 18, 2003
John Maynard Keynes was arguably the most influential Western economist ofthe twentieth century. His emphasis on the nature and role of uncertainty ineconomics is a ...