ABSTRACT
Tony Lawson (1997, 2003) has both been cherished and chastised for his characterization of mainstream economics as being positivist in methodological orientation, as dealing with closed instead of open systems, as aiming to represent event regularities (of the form “whenever event x then event y”) instead of underlying causal structures and mechanisms and as exemplifying a mathematical-deductivist style of theorizing and modelling.2 Lately, in a reply to Reiss (2004), however, Lawson states that he never held that mainstream economists are only interested in event regularities. Nor did he ever assert that neoclassical economists ignore or deny the existence of underlying causal mechanisms. Lawson asserts that he never questioned that mainstream economists entertain broader visions of economic reality consistent with the causalist ontology that he himself accepts. What he rather always held, Lawson argues, is that their preferred mathematical-deductivist style of theorizing cannot possibly do justice to such broader visions: “the prior attachment to certain sorts of mathematical methods imposes an (often unnoticed) ontology mostly inconsistent with those visions” (Lawson 2004, 337).
