ABSTRACT
This chapter deals within a structuralist perspective, with the problem of the nature and types of idealization and concretization in economics. The most complete discussion of idealization from a structuralist perspective is due to De Donato, but this work is concerned mainly with idealization in physics. In the historical process more and more of the features originally ignored are incorporated into the theories which in this way become more accurate pictures of the world. Even though Karl Marx’s Subjekt, as described according to his method, is far from being “a fully determined real world independent of human description”, some extremely empiricist and instrumentalist philosophers would find it objectionable. Marx claimed that in economics the real Subjekt always had to be seen as an organisches Ganzes and conceptualized, no matter which concrete real given economy was going to be studied, through four general categories: production, distribution, exchange, and consumption.
