By Tony Lawson
Publisher: Routledge
Pages: 383 Publication Date: 2003-06
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0415253365
File PDF, size 10 Mb
I must say that I was quite surprised to read Herbert Gintis's negative review of Tony Lawson's recent book Reorienting Economics (2003) on this website. Especially puzzling is Gintis's impression that the book is simply a rewrite of Lawson's earlier book Economics and Reality (1997) with no new material added.
I simply cannot explain how Gintis could have missed so much I found in the book that is new. The only possible explanation is that he must have an edition different from my own; perhaps the one he bought in the US does not have the same content as the one I bought in the UK when the book first came out.
So let me tell the readers of this Amazon reaction line about all of the new material that was in my version of Lawson's book. Let's see: The new book extends Lawson's original ontological analysis (distinguishing among different forms of closed systems, as well as including a transcendental deduction of his conception of social reality) and an account of contrast explanation (tying it in with dialectical reasoning).
The book covers such new ground as the role of metaphor in social theorizing, the nature and utility of evolutionary economics, the possibility of borrowing from Biology, the relevance to social theorizing of mimetics, the nature of economics itself, and whether it can qualify as a separate social science. It also provides a lucid account of the current heterodox traditions, careful to identify what constitutes them as heterodox and also what distinguishes them from each other. In that regard, I think that Lawson makes a reasonable attempt at resolving what has been perceived by some as incoherence within Post Keynesianism.
Moreover, he indicates ways in which tensions within Feminist projects of epistemology and emancipation might be overcome. The latter analysis includes a novel interpretation and defense of feminist "standpoint theorizing" as well as a contribution assessing the nature of what he calls "sustainable emancipatory projects." Further, in addressing the project of (old) Institutionalism, Lawson makes, in my opinion, a major contribution to the interpretation of Thorstein Veblen. There were things there that I just had never realized before in my reading of Veblen. And further still, the book contains what I consider to be a very significant contribution to the history of formalistic economics (presented in the form of an illustration of Lawson's extremely important and novel model of evolutionary change elaborated in an earlier chapter). As far as I can tell, the coverage and exposition of these issues are entirely new to Reorienting Economics.
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