Ontology and the History of Economic Thought: An Introduction

Paul Lewis, Mário Graça Moura and Jochen Runde*

Forthcoming in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2020

1. Why history of economic thought?

Why indeed? The vast majority of economists seem to regard the history of economic ideas as
irrelevant at best or a nuisance at worst. The subject has long vanished from economics
programmes in most English-speaking countries, even in the form of elective courses, and the
same is true in many other places as well. It seems no exaggeration to say that most economics
departments would quietly endorse Arthur Pigou’s view of the history of economics, as cited
by Mark Blaug amongst others, as antiquarian researches on the wrong opinions of dead men
(e.g., Blaug, 1997, p. 1; 2001, p. 154).
There have been numerous discussions of this situation over the years (e.g., Blaug, 2001).
Rather than enter these debates, we shall rely instead on the words of perhaps the greatest
historian of economics, someone who was also a first-rate theorist: Joseph Schumpeter. While
Schumpeter always remained abreast of the latest developments in the subject—he was a strong
proponent of Walrasian general equilibrium theory as well as a founding member of the
Econometric Society, for example—he did not succumb to the Whiggish tendency to disregard
earlier forms of theorising. In the first chapter of his History of Economic Analysis
(Schumpeter, 1954), entitled “Why do we study the history of economics?”, he outlines a
number of benefits of studying the history of science in general and the history of economics
in particular. He remarks, for instance, that “[t]he significance and validity of both problems
and methods cannot be fully grasped without a knowledge of the previous problems and
methods to which they are the (tentative) response” (p. 4). But his most important point, from
our perspective, is that contemporary practitioners can “derive inspiration” (p. 4) from the study
of the history of their discipline. This is especially so in the case of economics, where

much more than in physics have results been lost on the way or remained in
abeyance for centuries. We shall meet with instances that are little short of

*
Kings College London; Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia and CEF.UP; and Cambridge
University, respectively.

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 appalling. Stimulating suggestions and useful if disconcerting lessons are much
more likely to come to the economist who studies the history of his science (p. 6).

Schumpeter thus clearly rejected the Whig historian’s view that the economics of the day
encapsulates everything that remains worth knowing from the past. He was right to do so, in
our opinion, since the requirements for this view to hold water are formidable. A simple
evolutionary argument can explain how flawed ideas can become dominant and reproduce
(Lawson 2003A, pp. 247ff).
Schumpeter’s views about how the history of economics may enrich contemporary
work will of course resonate with those who are dissatisfied with the current state of the
discipline. For them, the history of economics helps us to see where it may have made wrong
turnings and provides inspiration and ideas for potentially more fruitful alternatives. It is here
that ontology—defined as the investigation of the nature of reality, or the study of social
being—comes to the fore. For it is on this topic that the reflections of some of the great figures
of the past are especially rich and telling, even if they never actually used the term.

2. Social ontology and the history of economic thought

Although ontology as a topic is neglected to much the same degree as the history of economic
thought in most economics departments, it is in fact unavoidable in economic or scientific
research more widely (Arena and Lawson, 2015, p. 987). The reason for this is that what social
scientists do as researchers necessarily entails ontological commitments, if only to the extent
that the appropriateness of their methods depends on assumptions about the nature of (the
aspects of) social reality to which they are being applied (Lawson 2015A, pp. 19-21; 2019: pp.
3-6). Some researchers are sensitive to this dependence and careful to ensure that there is a
match between their methods and the social material they are investigating. In many cases,
however, and this is the norm in much of economics, the appropriateness of particular methods
is simply assumed, leaving implicit and unacknowledged the ontological assumptions on which
they depend.
However, many prominent heterodox thinkers, including some of the greatest figures
in the history of the discipline, have rejected particular methods on the grounds of there being
a mismatch between what those methods presume and (what were taken to be) certain broad
features of social reality. Keynes’s (1939) critique of econometrics on the grounds that it
presupposes, in his view counterfactually, uniformity and homogeneity of the environment
other than the fluctuations of the factors explicitly taken into account, is a case in point. So too
is Veblen’s (1898) scepticism about what he saw as the faulty conception of human nature

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embodied in homo economicus and the static, mechanical modes of analysis associated with it.
The rejection of methods that fail to do justice to the subjective dimension of social life, as
perhaps most prominently seen in the work of Hayek (1942-44), Lachmann (1977) or Shackle
(1972, 1979), is another important example of this kind of ontologically oriented critique.
Such critiques have often been used to prepare the ground for constructive endeavours
involving attempts to elaborate on various aspects of the ontology of the social world. Two
broad approaches may be distinguished.
The first, sometimes called socio-scientific ontology (Lawson 2019, p. 11), focuses on
the nature of particular kinds of social existents. Examples of this kind of ontological reasoning
include attempts to develop conceptions of capabilities (Sen), capital (Marx, Menger,
Schumpeter, Lachmann), conventions (Keynes), entrepreneurship (Schumpeter, Kirzner),
institutions (Commons, Ostrom, Veblen), markets (Hayek, Lachmann, Polanyi), money (Marx,
Menger, Commons, Keynes), social classes (Marx, Schumpeter), spontaneous order (Hayek)
and uncertainty (Keynes, Knight).
The second approach, socio-philosophical ontology (Lawson 2019, p. 11; also see p.
9), focusses on features of the social world that are thought to obtain or operate throughout it
(that is, on features of social being in general). Examples include attempts to conceptualise the
nature of choice and the open-ended nature of the social world to which such choices are said
to give rise (as found, for example, in Lachmann and Shackle); the relational or emergent nature
of social reality, many key attributes of which are thought to depend on the existence of
organising relations between its component parts (as Commons and Hayek argue); and the
processual nature of the social world, the reproduction and transformation of which is
conceptualised as depending upon the interplay between human agency and social structure (as
Schumpeter and Hayek, amongst others, emphasise).
Reasoning of this second kind is, however, often only partial in the sense of considering
only some features of social reality while ignoring others that may be worthy of attention. Nor
do the thinkers in question always fully adjust their methods to fit with their emerging vision
of the nature of the social world. Some explicitly acknowledge the importance of the
relationality and/or the processual nature of social reality, for example, whilst retaining
methods with ontological presuppositions that are quite at odds with that vision of the social
world. Schumpeter’s continued commitment to Walrasian general equilibrium theory as a
central analytical tool, notwithstanding his vision of capitalism as an evolutionary process, is
a notable example of this kind of tension (Graça Moura, 2002, 2015). Another is provided by
Marshall’s failure to complete a second edition of his Principles of Economics that was to have

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incorporated insights from biology (Pratten, 1998). Such inconsistencies between the
ontological presuppositions of the analytical tools and methods upon which a thinker relies and
their worldview or vision of the nature of social reality afford scope for the ontologically-aware
historian of thought to identify tensions and inconsistencies in that thinker’s work and possibly
to suggest how they might be resolved (Lawson 2015A, pp. 32-3).
Traditionally, the study of the ontological preconceptions of economics has not featured
prominently in contributions to the history of economic thought (Lawson, 2005B; Arena and
Lawson, 2015; Lewis, 2017). Over the past thirty years or so, however, the situation has
gradually changed, through the growth of a body of work on the ontological commitments of
many important economists including Coase (Mäki, 1998); Commons (C. Lawson, 1994,
2015); Hayek (Fleetwood, 1995, 1996; Lawson, 2005A; Lewis, 2012, 2015, 2016A, 2016B,
2017, 2020; Lourenço and Graça Moura, 2018; Runde, 2001; Zwirn, 2007); Kaldor (Lawson,
1989); Keynes (Lawson, 1994, 1996, 2003C; Runde, 1997); Knight (Runde, 1998); Lachmann
(Lewis, 2008; Lewis and Runde, 2007); Marshall (Caldari, 2015; Pratten, 1998); Marx
(Fleetwood, 2001; Meikle, 1985; Pratten, 1993); Menger (Mäki, 1990; C. Lawson, 1999); Mises
(Lewis, 2010; Zwirn, 2009); Schumpeter (Graça Moura, 2002, 2003, 2015, 2017); Sen
(Martins, 2012, 2015); Shackle (Latsis, 2015; Runde, 2000); Smith (Montes 2003); Sraffa
(Martins, 2012, 2013, 2014); and Veblen (Latsis, 2010; Lawson, 2002, 2015C; Martins, 2015).
The papers in this special issue represent a continuation of this line of investigation.

3. The papers in this special issue

Several of the contributions in the preceding list were published in a special issue of this journal
on the history of ontological thinking in economics focusing specifically on conceptions of
process and order (Arena and Lawson, 2015). The present special issue is a follow-up to that
one, in that it explores how ontology can be of help in the history of economic thought and also
how the latter can be useful for the former. However, this edition has a broader focus than its
predecessor. The papers included in the present issue investigate multiple topics, including how
particular thinkers have invoked considerations of (philosophical) ontology in making the case
for their own preferred approach, and how they have engaged in (socio-scientific) ontological
reasoning in their analysis of, say, money or capital.
The first paper, by Diogo Lourenço and Mário Graça Moura, is an attempt to articulate
the foundations and aims of what is perhaps the most prominent explicitly ontologically-
oriented research programme in the history of economic thought: the one that Tony Lawson,
in tandem with a number of former students, has been pursuing over the last 30 years. Lourenço

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and Graça Moura argue that this programme, already implicit in Lawson’s “The nature of
heterodox economics” (Lawson, 2006), comprises three components: investigations into how
an a priori commitment to mathematical-deductivist methods became and remained dominant;
investigations of the ontological commitments of heterodox economists, using Lawson’s
philosophical ontology as lens and basis for comparison; and, ultimately, the formulation of a
history of economic thought that would underscore the ontological conceptions of economists,
explain the extent to which their positions can be reconciled as developments of different
aspects of the same broad ontological framework, and make ontologically grounded choices
when these positions are irreconcilable.
Lourenço and Graça Moura illustrate the achievements of the programme by reviewing
the contributions it has generated on the writings of later members of the Austrian School. The
paper closes with some comments on the connection between, and relative importance of, the
history of economic thought and social ontology, and on why the former provides important
inputs for the latter.
The following three papers are devoted to ontological themes in the work of Marx. In
the first of these, Roberto Lampa and Martín Abeles demonstrate how central ontology was to
Marx’s research project from his doctoral dissertation onwards, even if this feature of his work
has often been obscured by the neglect of ontology in the history of economic thought.
Furthermore, they argue that Marx’s ontologically grounded critique of political economy,
which historicises capitalism and grapples with its underlying social relations, remains
essential to the development of contemporary economics. Here Lampa and Abeles focus on the
prospects of heterodox economics as represented by Post Keynesianism broadly interpreted,
and some streams of orthodox economics as represented by New Political Economy and New
Institutional Economics.
While these schools of thought take the nature of the social reality more seriously than
is common in mainstream economics, Lampa and Abeles argue that they nevertheless contain
elements inimical to the development of a truly critical alternative to orthodoxy. They point to
the privileging of technical over ontological issues in the Neo-Ricardian literature, for example,
and more generally to the way in which more ontologically informed perspectives are inhibited
by what they term an axiomatic habitus in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense. That is to say, Lampa and
Abeles argue that the skills and dispositions economists acquire in becoming members of their
academic community predispose them to deductivism while undermining an ontological
orientation.

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 The second paper on Marx, by Giovanni Bonifati, is primarily an exercise in ontological
elaboration (Arena and Lawson, 2015, p. 987) that draws on Marx and his interpreters with a
view to contributing to a critical ontology of socio-economic transformation. Bonifati begins
by retrieving Marx’s conception of labour as creative and transforming social praxis; his related
notions of commodity fetishism and alienation; and his analysis of the emergence of new
systems of division of labour, where qualitative transformation is triggered by changes in the
scale of production. Building on these elements and their interactions, Bonifati arrives at and
analyses five ontological propositions about socio-economic transformation processes. These
propositions concern the emergence of intentionality from concrete social life; the nature of
social labour as an organised, intentional activity; alienation as the loss of power over the
definition of needs and of the purposes of labour; the processual nature of causality, connected
to labour as a social praxis; and emergence as a set of processes of qualitative transformation
in a system of division of labour.
The last of the three papers on Marx is by Stavros Tombazos and focusses on the nature
of capital. Tombazos argues that for Marx capital is the “autonomous” subject of capitalist
production, preserving and multiplying itself like a Hegelian living organism. Capital has a
“will”—towards the production of surplus value and its reproduction in an expanded scale—
and, in as much as it retains its identity in its various appearances, a “soul”. This conception of
capital as a teleological process is linked to Marx’s understanding of value as a Hegelian
“essence” and to his concept of fetishism. Tombazos goes on to scrutinise Marx’s circuits of
money capital, productive capital, and commodity capital. These are depicted as corresponding
to three rhythms—the “valorisation of value”, the “accumulation of value”, and the “realisation
of value”—that together reflect the syllogistic (in Hegel’s sense) nature of capital. From this
perspective, Tombazos argues, every capitalist crisis can be interpreted as a discordance of
rhythms, as an “arrhythmia”.
Tony Endres and David Harper explore the ontological presuppositions of several
approaches to the study of capital and consider the role of ontological issues in various
controversies in the history of capital theory. Their paper begins with a discussion of how,
when earlier generations of economists reflected on each another’s views about the nature of
capital, they often relied on a distinction between materialist conceptions, which portray capital
as a produced means of production, and fundist approaches, according to which capital is a
homogenous fund of financial value. Endres and Harper argue that this dualistic ontology is
inadequate for understanding many important theories and debates, and that what is needed is
a more sophisticated approach that can accommodate features of capital not captured by the

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simple materialist-fundist dichotomy. For Endres and Harper, these features include the
relational aspects of capital; its causal powers; the nature of the process through which capital
is created and transformed; and the significance of time. Endres and Harper go on to explore
what this more nuanced approach might involve by examining the notions of capital to which
a variety of theorists, ranging from Frank Knight and Friedrich Hayek through Joan Robinson
to Paul Samuelson, subscribe. In doing so, they highlight what the metaphors those authors use
to articulate their theories of capital reveal about their ontological commitments, in particular
concerning whether capital is viewed as atomistic or relational in nature.
Another important distinction highlighted in this paper concerns whether theorists
viewed their models of capital as “surrogate” systems that were intended to provide abstract
representations of real-world capital goods or as “substitute” systems devised principally to
facilitate the formal deduction of certain results. Endres and Harper argue that this distinction
can illuminate certain debates in the history of capital theory, such as that between Friedrich
Hayek and Frank Knight. It can also provide a basis for developing ontologically-oriented
critiques of formal approaches to the analysis of capital that, because they presuppose that the
world is atomistic, struggle to do justice to its relational features. Illustrating this point, the
paper ends with a critical appraisal of recent theories that emphasise the monetary dimensions
of capital, as perhaps most notably found in the work of Thomas Piketty. For Endres and
Harper, Piketty’s efforts to operationalise his theory led him to conceptualise capital as a
monetary aggregate, an approach that—because it ignored the relational and multi-layered or
emergent nature of capital—severely limited the explanatory power of his theory.
The next paper, by Toru Yamamori, addresses questions of socio-scientific ontology,
focusing in particular on the concept of “need” in the writings of the founder of the Austrian
school of economics, Carl Menger. Yamamori draws on the first and especially the second
edition of Menger’s Grundsätze (1923)—only the first has been translated into English—in
order to argue that Menger was committed to the idea that people have needs that are irreducible
to their subjective wants and desires. Yamamori contends that Menger’s emphasis on the notion
of need was consistent with his subjective theory of value and that it became more prominent
in the second edition of the Grundsätze. He goes on to argue that this aspect of Menger’s
thought was downplayed by later generations of Austrian and neoclassical economists, such as
Friedrich Hayek and Frank Knight, because of what they saw as its inconsistency with
Menger’s subjectivism. For Yamamori, this perceived tension contributed to Hayek and
Knight’s decision to use the first edition of the Grundsätze, in which the notion of need featured
less prominently, rather than the second edition—where it received a more extended

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treatment—as the basis for their English edition of that work. This in turn led to the neglect of
the concept of need in Menger’s thought until its rediscovery by institutionalist economists
such as Karl Polanyi and Karl Kapp.
The following two papers, by Nuno Martins and Stephen Pratten respectively, focus on
ontological themes in the work of two of the founding fathers of American Institutionalism.
Martins’ paper is devoted to socio-philosophical ideas about process, order and stability in the
writings of Thorstein Veblen. The argument is formulated as a response to a paper by Lawson
(2015C) where, departing from a series of earlier writings (Lawson, 2003A, 2003B, 2005C,
2015B) in which Veblen is portrayed as conceptualising institutions as dependent on, but
nevertheless irreducible to, human agency and conduct, Veblen is interpreted as providing an
ideational conception of institutions as habits of thought. Lawson’s new interpretation includes
an account of what he sees as a shift over time in Veblen’s writings, from treating settled habits
of thought “common to the generality of men” as a source of stability in the face of
technological change to locating such stability instead in “traits of human nature” such as
propensities, aptitudes and so on (while emphasising processes of habituation as a medium
through which institutional change can occur).
Martins challenges Lawson’s new interpretation in some respects and extends it in
others. On the one hand, he questions whether Veblen’s views changed to the extent claimed
by Lawson and whether Lawson’s new interpretation is really all that different from his earlier
one. On the other, he argues that Lawson’s interpretation can be rendered consistent with a
generalisation of the Veblenian dichotomy in which the tension between technology and
institutions becomes a special case of a more general tension between habits of thought and
traits of human nature as interpreted in the preceding paragraph.
Stephen Pratten’s paper is socio-scientific in orientation and focuses on John
Commons’ writings on the nature of money and monetary theory. While this part of Commons’
oeuvre garnered considerable attention and acclaim from his contemporaries, it has since fallen
into relative obscurity. The reason for this state of affairs, according to Pratten, is that
Commons’ account of money was insufficiently grounded within his broader philosophical
framework in which community rights and duties are viewed as essential features of social
reality. Pratten aims to remedy this problem by considering Commons’ views on money in
light of the social positioning theory of money recently proposed by Lawson (2018A, 2018B).
After providing an overview of social positioning theory and drawing links with Commons’
account of the nature of social reality, Pratten shows how Commons’ theory of money can be
portrayed both as a variant of social positioning theory and also as enriching it.

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 The final paper, by Paul Lewis and Malte Dold, explores the role of ontological thinking
in the work of Nobel Laureate James Buchanan, one of the founders of modern public choice
theory and constitutional economics. Lewis and Dold show how ontological arguments were
central both to Buchanan’s critique of orthodox economics and to his constitutional political
economy. They focus particularly on Buchanan’s model of what he called “artifactual man”.
This model departs from the standard assumption that actors have a stable set of preferences
that can be defined independently of their actual choices and allows instead that they can
creatively choose the kind of preferences they have and the type of person they want to become.
The model underwrites both Buchanan’s account of constitutional choice—that is, his analysis
of how people can commit themselves to following a set of rules that will constrain their
subsequent actions—and also his critique of paternalism, which is explicitly ontological in
orientation.
Lewis and Dold identify tensions and shortcomings in Buchanan’s account of personal
constitutional choice, which they attribute to the limitations of his social ontology. They argue
first that Buchanan’s artifactual man did not entirely escape the orthodox approach and its
implicit ontology, this because he reintroduced standard choice theory into his analysis of
constitutional choice by portraying people as having a stable, higher-level preference ordering
by reference to which they decide upon their lower-order preferences. Second, Lewis and Dold
argue that, in placing so much emphasis on human agency, Buchanan neglected the role of
social structure in facilitating and shaping the creative decision-making involved in
constitutional choice. Lewis and Dold suggest that these two shortcomings are related insofar
as the absence of the category of ontologically irreducible social structure in Buchanan’s
thought left him with little option but to fall back on what remains an essentially orthodox
conception of the isolated decision-maker. Had he developed a fuller account of the structure-
agency relationship along the lines set out in the critical realist transformational model of social
activity, he could have engaged instead in the comparative study of how different institutional
regimes enhance or retard people’s capacity to make constitutional decisions.

Concluding comments
We hope that the contributions in this special issue will stimulate further research in this area,
whether this be aimed at historians of economic thought and/or at informing the development
of new theories and the discussion of contemporary issues. There are many avenues that such
work could take, and we close by mentioning a few of them.

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 The first is that there surely there remains much to explore in the work of the various
authors discussed in the current volume or in the literature referred to in Section 2. Second,
there is considerable scope for widening the project to include figures whose ontological
commitments and reflections have as yet received little attention. Plausible candidates here
include Boulding, Coase, Kirzner, Knight, Ostrom and Simon, to name but a few. Exploring
the contributions of ontologically informed investigations to specific debates in the history of
economic ideas is a another potentially illuminating line of inquiry. Although historically
informed contributions to socio-scientific ontology are now more common than they once
were, there is also considerable scope for development on this front. The discussions on the
nature of capital in this special issue are a case in point, most of them oriented towards how
they might inform contemporary debates. Other categories, such as money, technology,
innovation, human needs or social classes, to mention but a few possibilities, would surely
benefit from a similar treatment.

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