ABSTRACT
With Marxism largely abdicating concern over economic theory the critique of neoclassical economics falls into the hands of heterodox economics. Central to the heterodox critique of the mainstream is the divide the neoclassical pure theory project fosters between theory and history or the social. While the work of several heterodox economists figures into this chapter two heterodox perspectives are concentrated on: that of Geoffrey Hodgson and the work of Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis. Both perspectives are chosen partly for their sweeping survey of the issues the theory/history divide engenders from the days of the Methodenstreit, and partly for the way their work highlights the way the heterodox enterprise follows neoclassical economics in shrugging the substantive ontological questions of the very intelligibility and historicity of the economics discipline. While decrying neoclassical economics for “forgetting” history, heterodox theories elide the historical specificity of capitalism as the society which reveals its economic life transparently for the first time in history and the ontological and epistemological implications of that fact. Heterodox economics thus buys in to the most fundamental yet wrongheaded assumption of the mainstream – that economic life can be studied directly – which renders their critique flaccid and partial.
