microfoundations delusion: metaphor and dogma in

J. E. King has written a timely book. The dominant mainstream of the economics profession is deeply committed to the notion that macroeconomics requires microfoundations; yet there has not been a careful book-length examination of this dogma since Maarten Janssen’s (1993) methodological and James Hartley’s (1999) more historical accounts. King’s book is valuable, as it surveys both the microfoundations dogma itself and the methodological and philosophical accounts of reductionism and methodological individualism that are often thought to ground it. Its strength lies in the fact that King has read very widely and provides usable capsule summaries of a huge range of views of economists, philosophers, and social scientists facing cognate issues in their own disciplines. I Although foreshadowed earlier, a clear distinction between microeconomics and macroeconomics is a product of the 1930s. The terms were coined by Ragnar Frisch and spread through the newly formed Econometric Society. The relationship of John Maynard Keynes to this distinction—Keynes in fact used neither term—is more equivocal than the folk wisdom of economists would suggest. The nature of the relationship between micro- and macroeconomics was considered to be a critical issue from the outset, having been discussed by Frisch (1933) himself. (Frisch argued that a successful microanalysis must be grounded in a background macro analysis.) Leontief (1936) attacked Keynes’s General theory of employment, interest, and money (1936) on the ground that his aggregate analysis violated basic principles of microeconomics. There is considerable common ground among economists. No one really denies that the economy is a collection of individuals and that macroeconomics uses categories and relations that are not, on thei