ABSTRACT
Like Tony Lawson, I have avoided using the phrase ‘neoclassical economics’ in my work, because it has never seemed to me to pick out any definite school of thought distinguished by either a clear doctrine or method. Instead, it has tended to be used to refer to any economics that is not deemed ‘heterodox’. Furthermore, even that negative classification is generally unhelpful, because the boundaries of heterodoxy can reasonably be drawn differently by different commentators (e.g. Davis, 2009). Most recently, the cluster of research activity in mainstream literature most frequently rhetorically contrasted with neoclassicism by those who regard themselves as orthodox has been behavioural economics. But the majority of economists who embrace the label of heterodoxy do not regard typical behavioural economists as members of their club. In its assumptions and objectives most behavioural economics more closely resembles the early marginalist, Benthamite, economics of Jevons and Edgeworth than it does the post-war orthodoxy of Samuelson, Debreu and Arrow; but in that comparative context, orthodoxy is further from rather than closer to the classicism of Smith and Ricardo, which renders the semantics of neoclassicism peculiar. In the face of such confusion Lawson is well motivated to seek clarity in the original coinage of the term neoclassicism by Veblen. The results of Lawson’s (2013) philosophically sophisticated exercise in the history of thought, as also presented in Chapter 1 of the present volume, are a revelation. In light of it we can conclude that the meaning of neoclassical economics has likely never been fully clear and coherent in any usage since Veblen’s own, at least until Lawson’s paper. A neoclassicist, according to Veblen and Lawson, is one who appreciates that the world is more causally complex, context-sensitive and dynamic than their own modelling strategy would seem to presume, but who persists with the modelling strategy in question anyway.
