Last modified: 2016-06-09
Abstract
There is considerable discussion on the future scenarios of economics as discipline. Historians of economics and economic methodologists, in particular, are debating on the so-called “mainstream pluralism” (in the terminology introduced by John B. Davis), that is on the compresence of a variety of research programmes in today’s mainstream that significantly deviate from the neoclassical core and are pursued by different, often separated communities of researchers.
Moreover, virtually all research programs of today’s mainstream have their origins outside economics, that is in other disciplines, many of which had been victim of economics imperialism. In light of all this, it seems reasonable and safe to argue that (mainstream) economics is entering a phase of fragmentation, that might even develop into a truly post-foundational future for the discipline.
The paper wants to emphasize that this state of fragmentation in economics provides the general background for recent suggestions, by mainstream dissenters as well as heterodox economists, for the reunification of behavioural disciplines. To put it differently, evidence of this fragmentation, as well as signs of a possible post-foundational outcome for economics, might be detected in pleas for the construction of theoretical frameworks able to make otherwise distant social disciplines compatible with one another. The general idea is therefore to connect today’s “unity-of-science” proposals by leading economists to the disunity of economics, an epoch characterised by “reverse” imperialisms. As a first step in this direction, we examine Gintis’s proposal of a unified framework for behavioural disciplines as both a reaction to the disintegration of mainstream economics and the attempt at reorganizing this latter so as to prepare the advent of a post-neoclassical mainstream, essentially invoking the help of the other formerly imperial discipline, (socio)biology. Second, we examine Hodgson’s and other institutional economists’ call for a new mainstream, in radical opposition to the neoclassical core, requiring the collaboration of other disciplines as necessary precondition to the establishment of a new mainstream imposing an evolutionary turn to economics.