ABSTRACT
Tony Lawson (Chapter 1) recently provided a stimulating and provocative account of neoclassical economics. According to Lawson (Chapter 1), neoclassical economics is characterised by a methodological inconsistency. Drawing upon Thorstein Veblen’s (1900) usage of the term neoclassical, Lawson (Chapter 1) argues that neoclassical economists adopt: ‘a taxonomic orientation in the form of deductivism at the level of method’, which is inconsistent with the ‘historical processual ontology of unfolding causal sequence at the level of events’ (Lawson, Chapter 1: 66). That is, neoclassical economists are a group of economists who employ deductivist methods, which presuppose closed systems (that is, systems in which regularities of the form ‘if event X then event Y’ are ubiquitous) while simultaneously acknowledging that the social realm is a dynamic and evolving open system.
