B50 - Current Heterodox Approaches: GeneralReturn

Already during the financial crisis from 2007 through 2009, a growing number of scholars, laymen or media outlets blamed economics as such, at least partially, for the turmoil and subsequent economic malaise. Therefore, the debate concerning future long-term development of economics - or, more precisely, prevailing economic theory - has been intensifying. The following text outlines four possible scenarios - synthetic, evolutionary, reactionary, and revolutionary - of such a development. Each scenario is connected with a methodologist of economics or a methodologist of science, who represent it, for it is right the domain of methodology or/and philosophy of science wherein it is necessary to look for an ideological background belonging to different research traditions in economics as well as for an understanding of determining stances and worldviews of the traditions' proponents.

In the following text we introduce those approaches to the methodology of economics that are relevant from the perspective of post-Keynesianism. After a partially historical outline of philosophical and methodological stances of John Maynard Keynes and Nicholas Kaldor we attempt to shed some light on a more recent methodological concept, critical realism. This approach is in one way or in other influenced by the two economists' ideas in the realm, as well as some other post-Keynesians. We argue that this, originally heterodox, concept has had an ambition not only to operate as an alternative to the methodology of mainstream, orthodox economics, but to substitute it and thus, proponents say, make economics as such more relevant.