ABSTRACT
Tony Lawson has, over the last few years, established a reputation as the economics profession’s staunchest and most prolific defender of Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realist philosophy of science. In a series of papers beginning in the late 1980s Lawson systematically defended Bhaskarian realism as a general philosophical framework for understanding scientific knowledge-both natural and social-while at the same time using this philosophical perspective as the springboard for a sustained critique of the theoretical and empirical practice of mainstream economists.1
