Search results for ""Author Allen Oakley""

This landmark book presents a critical study of the Austrian subjectivism of Menger and Mises and assesses their contribution in the light of contemporary philosophy of the human sciences.Allen Oakley lays emphasis on the subjectivism of Menger and Mises as the foundation of Austrian economics. By situating their work in the context of the philosophies of the human sciences evolving around them, he shows how these founders of the modern Austrian tradition failed to fully appreciate and to adopt the more penetrating subjectivism of their contemporaries. He argues that, as a result, they left their successors an incomplete and ambiguous metatheoretical legacy.For historians of economic thought and for economic philosophers and methodologists the book provides a critical study of a fundamental theme of Austrian economics that is still the subject of controversy today.

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This insightful book critically assesses the subjectivist metatheoretical origins of the revival of modern Austrian economics. It examines the ideas of the main contributors to the Austrian school, including von Mises, von Hayek and Lachmann.Allen Oakley analyses the contribution to subjectivist philosophy made by the key founders of the neo-Austrian revival. He argues that while von Mises and von Hayek each confronted mainstream microeconomics with restricted subjectivist alternatives, Lachmann played the 'devil's advocate' for a more comprehensive range of subjectivist principles. The author finds that ultimately, although all three provided analyses that reached well beyond the confines of neoclassical economics, none fully applied the tenets of a complete subjectivism. Their contributions to the 1970s revival of interest in Austrian themes, and their legacies for neo-Austrian schools of thought, have thus left a great need for further methodological development if economics as a human science is to be reconstructed on subjectivist foundations.The Revival of Modern Austrian Economics will be of central interest to students and scholars of Austrian economics and to historians of economic thought and methodology more generally.

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In Classical Economic Man, Allen Oakley argues that two of the fathers of modern economics espoused methodological strategies which rejected the concept of ‘economic man’ and gave primacy to the human origins of economic phenomena.Adam Smith and J.S. Mill are shown to have been sensitive to the need for a pluralistic methodology in economics, constructed in accordance with its demands as a strictly human science that must contend with the contingencies of situated human conduct. Each went on to explicitly confront this in their theoretical arguments and in the design of their economic policy strategies. Drawing extensively on the original literature, Professor Oakley demonstrates that Smith’s approach through moral philosophy, and Mill’s through psychology and the philosophy of science, alerted them to the problems of giving proper representation to human agents in formal, scientific analyses. Smith and Mill, it is argued, rejected a classical orthodoxy that required methodology to be driven by the ambition to emulate the epistemology of the physical sciences. Scholars and students of the history of economic methodology and doctrines will welcome this important study which builds upon the original arguments, extending the interpretation to include often neglected details about the nature of classical methodology and its use of the concept of the ‘economic man’.

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This book applies a critical focus on the extent to which methodological practices in mainstream economic theory impede our understanding of substantive economic phenomena as the products of human action. Economists, in general, work with a concept and representation of the human agent that is palpably unrealistic. Most do so, not out of ignorance, but rather to maintain the pretence that economics is the only true science among the social sciences because it enforces the use of rigorous and formalist methods of argument.Allen Oakley's inquiry pursues ideas of social ontology pertinent to reconstructing economic theory in a way that addresses this lack of realism. These ideas take the form of a revised metatheory for a humanistic economics in which priority is given to properly understanding and depicting the human origins of economic phenomena, rather than to meeting the imposed demands of scientistic rigour. Indeed, he demonstrates that many ontological ideas pertinent to such a reconstruction are extant in the literature of social philosophy and theory, a literature largely neglected by economic theorists.Economists and social scientists concerned about the nature and problems of mainstream economic theory will gain a great deal from reading this challenging book.

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