RESEARCH INSTITUTE POLITICAL ECONOMY Methodology and Radical Political Economics Martin H. Wolfson October 2007 Gordon Hall 418 North Pleasant Street Amherst, MA 01002 Phone: 413.545.6355 Fax: 413.577.0261 Presented at
[email protected] www.peri.umass.edu REBELLIOUS MACROECONOMICS: MARX, KEYNES & CROTTY A conference in honor of James Crotty Methodology and Radical Political Economics Martin H. Wolfson Department of Economics and Policy Studies University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 Prepared for the Conference in honor of Jim Crotty University of Massachusetts at Amherst October 19-20, 2007 Methodology and Radical Political Economics by Martin H. Wolfson 1. Introduction Radical political economics has always encompassed a wide variety of economic theories and perspectives. In fact, printed in each issue of the Review of Radical Political Economics is the following statement: "As the journal of the Union for Radical Political Economics, the Review publishes innovative research in political economy broadly defined as including, but not confined to, Marxian economics, post-Keynesian economics, Sraffian economics, feminist economics, and radical institutional economics." Given the broad purview of radical political economics, the question arises: do the various theories that make up radical political economics have some methodological coherence, or are they disjoint B united in their opposition to neoclassical economics, but with theoretical assumptions, principles and methods, i.e., methodologies, that are incompatible with each other? The argument of this paper is that there is coherence.1 In particular, there is an emerging heterodox macroeconomic framework that builds upon the perspectives of Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and institutionalists like Wesley Clair Mitchell.2 A leader in the development of this framework is James R.