Economics as Social Theory
About the Book Series
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 โtheoryโ has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely asocial, ahistorical, mathematical โmodellingโ. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the โTheoryโ label, offering a platform for alternative rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorizing.
From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the social and the historical in the evolution of economic theory
1st Edition
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 ...
Speaking of Economics: How to Get in the Conversation
1st Edition
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 ...
Markets, Deliberation and Environment
1st Edition
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....
New Departures in Marxian Theory
1st Edition
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 ...
Transforming Economics: Perspectives on the Critical Realist Project
1st Edition
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 ...
The Evolution of Institutional Economics
1st Edition
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 ...
Postcolonialism Meets Economics
1st Edition
By S. Charusheela, Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin
December 18, 2003
In the last half century, economics has taken over from anthropology the role of drawing the powerful conceptual worldviews that organize knowledge and inform policy in both domestic and international contexts. Until now however, the colonial roots of economic theory have remained relatively ...
The Philosophy of Keynes' Economics: Probability, Uncertainty and Convention
1st Edition
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 ...
Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics
1st Edition
By Drucilla Barker, Edith Kuiper
June 06, 2003
Feminist economists have demonstrated that interrogating hierarchies based on gender, ethnicity, class and nation results in an economics that is biased and more faithful to empirical evidence than are mainstream accounts.This rigorous and comprehensive book examines many of the central ...
The Crisis in Economics
1st Edition
Edited
By Edward Fullbrook
June 05, 2003
Economics can be pretty boring. Drier than Death Valley, the discipline is obsessed with mathematics and compounds this by arrogantly assuming its techniques can be brought to bear on the other social sciences. It wasn't going to be long, therefore, before students started complaining. The vast ...
Reorienting Economics
1st Edition
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 ...
The World of Consumption: The Material and Cultural Revisited
2nd Edition
By Ben Fine
May 10, 2002
Consumption has become one of the leading topics across the social sciences and vocational disciplines such as marketing and business studies. In this comprehensively updated and revised new edition, traditional approaches as well as the most recent literature are fully addressed and incorporated, ...