Pluralism in Economics and Neoclassical Economics

This review of Yahya Madra’s Late Neoclassical Economics centers on a claim made by mainstream economics to have surpassed the narrow horizon of neoclassical economics, understood as general equilibrium or Walrasian economics, having differentiated into a pluralist field. Through a detailed study of neoclassical economics, Madra distills the misplaced nature of this claim and disputes the propositions that neoclassical economics is nothing but Walrasian and that its new diverse theories belong to the nonneoclassical domain. Rather, the diverse theories of mainstream economics are shown to share with Walrasian economics, and with one another, a common problematic of theoretical humanism in the form of reconciling individual and aggregative/collective rationality in order to achieve a socioeconomic order. This review discussion ends by raising some issues that are absent or latently present in Madra’s book.