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Modern macroeconomic theories of cycles and crisis: A methodological critique
Abstract
This dissertation undertakes a methodological critique of several of the predominant modern business cycle and crisis theories, including contributions to neo-Marxian, new Keynesian and new classical macroeconomics. The dissertation uncovers a shared metaphysical foundation underlying these otherwise diverse accounts. This foundation is identified as the necessity/contingency dualism; it entails the inaugural presumption that economic science must begin with an ontological judgement about which forces are primarily responsible for determining the source of economic events. This designation of "necessity" entails by the same stroke the demotion of all other economic forces to the status of "contingency." The dissertation investigates the strategies by which the different paradigms under review--monopoly capital theory, long wave theory, social structures of accumulation theory, and new classical and new Keynesian macroeconomics--handle the difficult problems that attend the necessity/contingency dualism in the context of their respective models of the business cycle and/or crisis. These strategies are identified as the "contingent context" and the "temporal bifurcation" resolutions. The dissertation traces both the philosophical bases of these resolutions and the irresolvable dilemmas which attend the dualism but which are largely unrecognized in modern economics. In the case of each paradigm, the specific effects of the dualism are uncovered and examined. Finally, the dissertation undertakes a detailed examination of one school of Marxian thought that has attempted to found economic explanation on an alternative metaphysical basis. This school, centered around the Association for Economic and Social analysis (AESA), develops an explicitly anti-essentialist framework which denies the categories of necessity and contingency. The dissertation concludes with s sketch of new approaches to anti-essentialist economic explanation that extend the AESA framework while overcoming certain debilitating errors in the work of the AESA school.
Subject Area
Economics|Economic theory
Recommended Citation
Demartino, George Francis, "Modern macroeconomic theories of cycles and crisis: A methodological critique" (1992). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9305817.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9305817