The political economics method
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18041/1900-0642/criteriolibre.2011v9n14.1231Abstract
This is the fi rst review that I will write about two books of the same author. I don’t pretend to summarize his work of more than three decades and represented in many publications, but to invite the readers and mainly Economists to seriously consider studying the political economics research program made by a philosopher inspired by diverse arguments of many colleagues and that offers a unique and innovative systematic approach. Professor Zanotti on the preface: “The general theory of knowledge is previous to the philosophy of science, this one previous to the philosophy of social science and this one, previous to the methodology of any social science in particular” (Zanotti, 2004, p. 12). I think that we, the economists, have an enormously biased formation when introducing our studies into a “general theory of knowledge”, which makes us come closer to philosophy in order to understand what we do and the way we operate. So, there’s nothing better than approximating a philosopher, who has concentrated his work in how to organize a political economics research program. We summarize his proposal here and understand that it should compete with others designed by other Economists. The book has five chapters. In the first chapter, the author takes the contributions of two epistemologists: Popper and Lakatos. In the second chapter, he adds three more: Mises, Hayek and Machlup. The author clarifies though, that he will not describe each thinker’s position as a whole, but only what is interesting for his Organization. The third chapter, considering the previously mentioned contributions, is the systematical organization of his research program. We consider that it is convenient to reproduce so far, the review’s structure of the first three chapters of the book. The fourth chapter presents systematically, the three methods that in the author’s opinion are harmonically combined in the methodology of social science. These last chapters hold the biggest philosophical contents. Strictly due to space restrictions, we will take the essential components and insert them in the structure of the first three chapters.
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