The Philosophical Bases of Institutionalist Economics

Abstract

The precise nature of relationship between disciplines of economics and philosophy has yet to be explicated in detail. Certain family resemblances can be readily verified, and traced to a common lineage. Many of precursors of Western economic theory, such as John Locke and Adam Smith, were self-identified moral philosophers; many other inhabitants of pantheon of economic theory, such as Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, are recognized as having made substantial contributions to philosophy. Nevertheless, in modem era, ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny; and average economist in late twentieth century would deny any necessary or close links between two fields. In economics, facade of repudiation of philosophical preconceptions is propped up by widespread conviction that modem economics has successfully adopted character and attributes of a science. This invocation of science is intended to settle all arguments once and for all and to expiate all sins. Of course, this has been a vain hope. Disputes over method, epistemology, and ontology have not been banished because an invocation of science merely impounds controversy under rubric of the philosophy of science, without really

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