Some sociological explanations for the present condition of neoclassical economics

This is Chapter 7 from Social Economics: An Alternative Theory (St. Martin's Press, 1991) Since Alfred Marshall's time, it has become ever more difficult to draw attention to the need for something besides technique to bridge the gap between the world that (presumably) exists outside our heads and the symbols through which we communicate about the world. In this chapter the author takes a somewhat impressionistic look at the sociology of the field of economics. Given a discipline which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, has problems that it can not resolve, how will it develop, through the end of twentieth and into the twenty-first century, with the claim that it is a science - indeed, 'the queen of the social sciences'