This book asks how a more liberating economics could be constructed and taught. It suggests that if economists today are serious about emancipation and empowerment, they will have to radically change their conception about what it means for a citizen to act rationally in a complex society. Arnsperger emphasises that current economics neglects an important fact: Many of us ask not only 'what's in it for us', within a given socio-economic context; we also care about the context itself.The author argues that if citizens keen on exercising their critical reason actually demanded economic theories that allowed them to do so, economics would have to become a constantly emerging, open-ended knowledge process. He claims that in a truly free economy, there would be no all-out war between 'orthodox' and 'heterodox' approaches, but an intricate and unpredictable 'post-orthodox' pluralism that would emerge from the citizens' own complex interactions. Offering an original and path-breaking combination of insights from Hayek, the theory of complexity, and the Frankfurt School of social criticism, Arnsperger discusses how such a free economy would generate its specific brand of economics, called 'Critical Political Economy'
1 Introduction 1
Pt. I Uncritical complexity 21
2 Uncritical atoms : the limits of standard economics 23
3 Uncritical mass : the limits of complexity economics 56
4 The use of uncritical knowledge in society 82
Pt. II Bottom-up critical theory : the logic of self-criticizing complexity 103
5 The use of critical knowledge about society 105
6 Bottom-up critical theory : what does economics describe? 139
7 A self-criticizing economic system 162
Pt. III Toward a critical mainstream? 195
8 A formal approach to critically rational action 197
Pt. IV Critical political economy : the logic of "post-orthodox" pluralism 229
9 The use of economics in a complex economy 231
10 Free-economy economics 256
11 Post-orthodox pluralism in economics 275
Notes 293
Bibliography 295
Index 306
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