Jonathan Levy in Phenomenal World:
No discipline in the humanities or social sciences today has a convincing theory of the economy. Long preoccupied with honing methods, the core of the discipline of economics has abandoned investigation into what the economy really is. Preoccupied with either appropriating or criticizing the methods of economics, other disciplines have failed to articulate any alternative conceptions of the economy.
A conspicuous absence of a convincing theory is what prevails today, but it was not always the case. In the period stretching from 1890 to 1930, when the modern discipline of economics was formed, fierce debates raged, as many different “visions” of the economy, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter once put it, circulated and competed with one another. This period—after Marx made the last great contribution to “political economy” but before the triumph of “neoclassical” economics—was a moment of “methodological pluralism.” For figures like Schumpeter, the subject of economics was by no means obvious. Rather, the very task of positing an economic problem, he wrote, would require that, “we should first have to visualize a distinct set of coherent phenomena as a worthwhile object of our analytic efforts.”
In my encounter with these “years of high theory,” as one chronicler characterized them, the economics of Keynes and Veblen have loomed the largest. Veblen and Keynes were economic theorists writing before neoclassicals transformed economic theory into an entirely mathematical affair, and both preferred verbal exposition (Veblen nearly exclusively). Keynes entitled his most important books Treatise on Money and The General Theory, and Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. While these texts stand today as the most notable from the period, the economic visions of a great many twentieth-century economic theorists also crossed diverse institutionalist, post-Keynesian, Marxist, Austrian, French Regulation, and even neoclassical traditions—from Irving Fisher to John Hicks, Joseph Schumpeter, Frank Knight, Joan Robinson, Albert Hirschman, Nicholas Kaldor, and others. If in different ways, all first cultivated or sought to carry forward the rich legacies of pre-World War II economic theory.
More here.
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