ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to analyze whether the reinsertion of psychological insights into new economic streams leads to a consideration of "classical practical rationality" and if it concomitantly involves an escape from today's prevalent physicalist and deterministic metaphysical worldview. It considers the early 20th-century consumer theory, exposing a tension between its defense of freedom and the exactness demanded by its contemporary view of science. The chapter examines Herbert Simon's thinking. It also argues that it is clear that modern behavioral economics (MBE) does not consider practical reason and that, despite appearances to the contrary, it is a physicalist approach. Erik Angner and George Loewenstein's article on behavioral economics accused neoclassical economics of falling into behaviorism, the positivistic psychological theory founded by John B. As of the 1950s, the situation became more obscure: psychology was more acutely disappearing from economics. The general equilibrium theories and the von Neumann and Morgenstern rationality axioms contain little if any psychology.
