ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the problem of paradigm and identifies many perspectives. The paradigm guides a scientific community's selection of problems, evaluation of data, and advocacy of theory. Paradigms establish the limits of what is possible, the boundaries of acceptable inquiry. A successful paradigm then enables a scientific community to determine criteria for the selection of problems to be used for finding solutions. The movement toward the formulation of a mainstream paradigm has been traced from its positivist tradition, especially the logical empiricism that captivated many positivist thinkers of the late nineteenth century and the behaviorists of the mid-twentieth century. Both the mainstream and alternative scholars have studied questions of political economy and, inevitably, the counter-paradigm that Karl Marx developed in his criticism of bourgeois social science and political economy. The principal concern of political economy in Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries was the nature of wealth in an impersonal system of markets.
