ABSTRACT
The University of Missouri at Kansas City hosted a conference on'The History of Heterodox Economics in the 20th Century`. Post-Keynesian economics can be seen as covering a considerable assortment of approaches. The unifying feature of post-Keynesians is the dislike of neoclassical economics. Post-Keynesians tend to define their program in a negative way as a reaction to neoclassical economics. Wassily Leontief observes critically how page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas. Friedman states that 'economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with real economic problems'. Ontology is the study of the basic nature and structure of a domain of reality. The social realm is highly interconnected, organic and structured. In some fields of physics, such as super string theory, mathematical methods seem actually to be universally applied, but without sign of a heterodox opposition. Thus, Modern heterodoxy is, qua heterodoxy, first and foremost an orientation in ontology.
