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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 and pluralistic, and unravel the processes that lead to orthodoxy’s current predicament. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and the dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from the other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It is argued that recent attempts from within economics to address the social and the historical have failed to acknowledge long standing debates amongst economists, historians and other social scientists. This has resulted in an impoverished historical and social content within mainstream economics. The book ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British historical schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Socialökonomik, and the Austrian school. At the same time, developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account drawn from the past is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again, rather than as a positive science, as has been the inclination since the time of Jevons and Walras. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences, but in a particular way that is in exactly the opposite direction now being taken by \"economics imperialism\". Drawing on the rich traditions of the past, the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy will be possible in the future.

The mathematisation and formalisation of economic science has been one of the most important features of the development of economic science in the latter part of the twentieth century. What were the causes behind this ubiquitous mathematisation of economic science? Recent scholarship places excessive emphasis on the role and prestige of mathematics as a scientific tool. In this paper we argue this is inadequate, not least because it fails to account for the whole classical era when mathematical economists failed to have any impact. Explaining this failure is one of the main aims of this paper. Most accounts focus mostly on the intellectual factors involved failing to do justice to what amounts to a multifaceted and complicated phenomenon involving social, economic, political, intellectual, normative and institutional factors. Partly redressing the balance by bringing to the fore the various factors involved is the other prime aim of this paper.

Ronald Coase's famous Theorem states that externalities — third-party effects of transactions that undermine the supposed optimality of competitive equilibrium — do not need to be corrected by active government policy, as in the classical presentation by A. C. Pigou, if there are complete markets in property rights. This Theorem, however, is inherently flawed, as revealed by \"internal\" or \"immanent\" critique of its assumptions. It thus fails, even on its own terms. Beyond this, however, a more radical critique, which foregrounds issues of social structure, social relations, power and conflict, forms the basis for a comprehensive analysis of (capitalist) property rights. This radical analysis of the Coase Theorem and the debate spawned by it has implications for the entire field of \"law and economics\" studies, and for its central notion that legal doctrine can be based on any set of pure efficiency criteria.

Hodgson's review of our books argues against us that marginalism neither adopted methodological individualism nor excluded the social from economics. Thus, he finds a partial solution to sickonomics in abandoning the term methodological individualism and using both structures and individuals as analytical starting point(s), revisiting Marshallian marginalism dressed up in socio-institutional clothing. He also denies any relationship between the current malaise in economics and the marginal revolution, as we claim, focusing exclusively on institutional developments since the Second World War. We show Hodgson is either partial or wrong on all of these counts. Firstly, his alternative to methodological individualism is untenable. Secondly, institutions, although implicitly present in Marshallian and Walrasian economics, play no substantive analytical role and as such are superfluous. Finally, although institutional factors help explain the sickness of modern economics (in addition to socioeconomic, ideological, political, and intellectual factors), the intellectual roots of this decay lie in the conceptual framework established around the marginal revolution.

The purpose of this article is to appraise the analytical usefulness of the new institutionalist approach by investigating the explanatory capacity of the transaction cost concept. After a discussion of the problems of defining the concept of transaction costs through the identification of three different uses of the term found in the literature, we turn to the problems associated with the analytical distinction between the institutional environment and organizations as players of the game, and more specifically to the treatment of organizations as individual actors. Further, it is shown that transaction costs as a concept is inherently unqualified for operationalization. Last, we examine the usefulness of the transaction cost concept in explaining the emergence of organizations by focusing on two specific cases, Coase's and Williamson's theories of the firm. Our conclusion is that the transaction cost concept cannot provide a sufficient rationale for explaining either the emergence of institutions or the origins of organizations given its static, ahistorical and universalistic nature.

The aim of this paper is to examine the relative merits and drawbacks of two recent models of market socialism proposed by Bardhan and Roemer. This is done, first, by putting these models into the perspective of the history of economic thought. Thus, after presenting the basic elements of the early Lange model as well as the Austrian and ‘new information economics’ critiques, the necessary comparisons and contrasts are made to see what new light these new models bring into this debate. In addition, the internal consistency and coherence of these models is checked in terms of their own proclaimed goals. Last, a more radical methodological critique is provided.

The current intellectual climate is marked by a dual retreat, faltering and uneven, from the excesses of neo-liberalism and postmodernism. First, the idea that the world is, and should be made as far as possible, like a perfect market, virtualism for Carrier and Miller (1998), is losing ground, giving way to an understanding organized around the more-or-less pervasive presence and influence of market imperfections and the need for the non-market to correct them. Second, obsessive interpretative and relativist deconstruction of the world associated with the cultural turn across the social sciences is increasingly conceding to a renewal of interest in material culture—how reality is both construed and created. Over the past decade, the extraordinary rise to prominence of two concepts in particular has symbolized these developments. In the lead, serving as a filter for a highly diverse range of approaches and topics, is globalization.For brief overview, see Fine (2002a, ch. 2; 2002b). Close behind in timing, weight, and scope is social capital, the counterpart in most respects to globalization at the national or lower levels of community.See Fine (2001) for a comprehensive and critical account.

This article reviews Robert Brenner's ‘The Economics of Global Turbulence’, New Left Review, May/June, 1998. Several decisive weaknesses of Brenner's contribution are identified. First, Brenner's theoretical treatment of capitalist competition and accumulation is in the spirit of Adam Smith and mainstream economics rather than Marx. Second, Brenner ignores the significance of credit for capitalist crisis. Third, he leaves entirely out of account the internationalisation of production and finance, phenomena which constitute the most salient feature of the contemporary global economy. Fourth, in short, Brenner's approach is not at all value-theoretic, a weakness that can also be found in some of his earlier historical work.