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...

Methodological comments on critical realism in economics have proliferated over the past decade-typically focusing on Tony Lawson's Economics and Reality and Reorienting Economics, which constitute the core of this project. In the present paper we select a series of important, mostly very recent...