Reflections Upon Heterodox Economics: Legacy and Prospects

In this review article, I take three themes from Lynne Chester and Tae-Hee Jo’s edited collection Heterodox Economics: Legacy and Prospects. The first is Geoff Hodgson’s critique which I summarise thus: heterodox economics lacks consensus, coordination, and organizational coherence because it lacks a definition of heterodoxy. The second and third themes are pluralism and interdisciplinarity. But pluralism has a shortcoming: even a sophisticated structured pluralism would remain within the disciplinary boundary of (heterodox) economics and, therefore, lack valuable insights found in other social science disciplines. Whilst interdisciplinarity appears to offer a solution, it too has a shortcoming: it connects disciplines, whilst leaving the boundaries between them in place. Moreover, the majority of heterodox economists know that economic phenomena are not separate from, but are entangled with, myriad social phenomena, and if so, investigation might require going beyond interdisciplinarity, perhaps to transdisciplinarity. The conclusion draws all these strands together, to consider their implications for the future prospect of heterodox economics.