This review focuses upon three themes from Aristotle's Economic Thought by Scott Meikle, (1995) to reveal how (1) Aristotle's essentialist metaphysics can assist in clarifying contemporary issues in (2) value theory and (3) economics as ethics. Essentialism allows one to pose (adequately) the...

An economic system requires a principle of organisation. An adequate theory has to uncover and elaborate this principle Hayek rejects the principle of equilibrium, opting instead for a transformational principle of order. A theory of the latter requires an elaboration of real market processes,...

Boylan and O'Gorman have recently elaborated an interesting new perspective called causal holism, which attempts to go beyond developments in rhetoric and realism. The aim of this paper is to evaluate causal holism from the perspective of critical realism. Emphasis is placed primarily on three...

Using insights from the 'socio-economics of labour markets' and building upon critical realist meta-theory, this paper offers the first sketch of a socio-economic model of labour markets as an alternative to the orthodox model. Copyright The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on...

Lionel Robbins, in his famous Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, correctly showed that the task of economics is to develop, step by step, a realistic comprehension of the economic system based upon the abstract starting point of a theory of value. His mistake was to think...

This paper examines critically the method of abstraction offered by critical realism. Our main argument is that critical realism fails to articulate the synthetic side to abstraction. For this reason, the critical realist method is unable to capture the 'inner connection' of social phenomena. We...