This paper addresses the problem of the conceptualization of social structure and its relationship to human agency in economic sociology. The background is provided by John Maynard Keynes's observations on the effects of uncertainty and conventional behavior on the stock market; the analysis...

We critically assess the nature, method and scope of neoclassical economics, and its purported relationship to the famous definition of economics by Lionel Robbins (that economics is the science of human behaviour as a relationship between scarce mans that have alternative uses). We claim that...

This paper is the introduction to a special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics on the topic of ontology and the history of economic thought. It explains what is meant by social ontology and why ontological issues should be taken seriously by historians of economic thought. It then goes...

Although Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations is often cited as marking the birth of economics, it was really not until after the second world war that economics became the distinctive, more or less unified, and largely separate discipline summarised in the textbooks of today. Even a mere...

We address the challenge of attempting to advance a strong and consistently subjectivist view of economic agency without simultaneously undermining the possibility of providing a coherent account of social institutions and socio-economic order. The argument is presented as a case study and...

This paper addresses the problem of the conceptualization of social structure and its relationship to human agency in economic sociology. The background is provided by John Maynard Keynes's observations on the effects of uncertainty and conventional behavior on the stock market; the analysis...

In the insurance literature it is often argued that private markets can provide insurance against ‘risk’ but not against ‘uncertainties’ in the sense of Knight (1921) or Keynes (1921). This claim is at odds with the standard economic model of risk exchange which, in assuming that...