ABSTRACT
I will begin by stating that, for what it is worth, I am in substantial agreement with Lawson’s fundamental complaint that the economics profession is dominated by a mainstream orthodoxy which is “not in too healthy a condition” due to its insistence on following a specific methodological approach, one that is not well matched to the social reality it wishes to investigate (p. 3). I make similar complaints in the final chapter of my book on Hayek (Caldwell 2004), and indeed I quote liberally from Lawson’s earlier book (Lawson 1997) in that chapter. In this regard I consider Lawson a colleague who shares a quest, that of figuring out why economics turned out the way it did in the twentieth century. This quest has historical, methodological, ideological, sociological, and even pedagogical dimensions, and we are but two of many who have contributed to it (a selective sample might include Mäki 1999, Mirowski 1989, 2002, Weintraub 2002, and selected articles in Colander and Brenner 1992).
