Lionel Robbins, in his famous Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, correctly showed that the task of economics is to develop, step by step, a realistic comprehension of the economic system based upon the abstract starting point of a theory of value. His mistake was to think...

This paper examines critically the method of abstraction offered by critical realism. Our main argument is that critical realism fails to articulate the synthetic side to abstraction. For this reason, the critical realist method is unable to capture the 'inner connection' of social phenomena. We...