ABSTRACT
Social theory explicitly committed to elaborating the nature of social being and/or how we access social reality is experiencing something of a revival in economics.1 The five chapters which follow can all be counted as contributing to this trend. In fact they all in some way connect with a specific social theory project of the sort in question, one that has been systematised within economics as critical realism.2 Under this head, numerous results, arguments, conjectures and critiques have been produced in recent years,3 and the chapters included here aim to take some of these specific developments further.4 My own object in this introductory chapter is merely to facilitate the contributions which follow: to outline something of their context and to sketch certain basic ideas and results that are treated in the following chapters as ‘given’, that are taken as sufficiently well grounded (if of course always corrigible) premises.
