ABSTRACT
The persistent failures and incoherencies of modern economics have been explained and a potentially fruitful way forward identified. And this result has been achieved primarily by way of methodological/ philosophical enquiry. This warrants emphasis. For it appears that even among methodologists and meta-methodologists there is a consensus developing that methodological enquiry can achieve no such thing. A recently dominant view is that normative methodology is necessarily foundationalist and thereby arbitrary and unwarranted. Any critical input from methodology/philosophy is supposed to be undesirably imposing,1 or even impossible.2 Instead, this line of reasoning goes, methodology should take the form of (or be replaced by) something like an endeavour merely to describe the practices, rhetoric, or contexts of contemporary economists. Certainly a characteristic of much recent writing of a methodological kind in economics is a relative absence of criticism of economists' actual practices.3
