ABSTRACT
My central thesis is briefly stated. The essence of contemporary mainstream economics does not lie at the level of substantive theory as most of its critics suggest, but at the level of methodology. Specifically, the most fundamental feature is a generalised insistence on the deductivist mode of explanation, including an unsustainable commitment to the 'whenever this then that' structure of 'laws'. And it is in this very essence that the perpetual disarray of the subject is rooted. For, while the generalised usefulness of deductivism is dependent upon a ubiquity of closed systems, the social world, the object of social study, is fundamentally open and seemingly insusceptible to scientifically interesting local closures, or at least to closures of the degree of strictness that contemporary methods of economics require.
