Tony Lawson is a member of the Faculty of Economics and Politics at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Part 1 The Current Orientation of the Discipline and the Proposed Alternative; Chapter 1 Four Theses on the State of Modern Economics; Chapter 2 An Ontological Turn in Economics; Chapter 3 What has Realism got to do with it?; Part 2 Possibilities for Economics; Chapter 4 Explanatory Method for Social Science; Chapter 5 An Evolutionary Economics?; Chapter 6 Economics as a Distinct Social Science?; Part 3 Heterodox Traditions of Modern Economics; Chapter 7 The Nature of Post Keynesianism and the Problem of Delineating the Various Heterodox Traditions; Chapter 8 Institutional Economics and Realist Social Theorising; Chapter 9 Feminism, Realism and Universalism; Part 4 A Historical Perspective on Economic Practice; Chapter 10 An Explanation of the Mathematising Tendency in Modern Economics;

Contemporary economics is characterized by a mismatch between its methods of analysis and the nature of the world it seeks to interpret. Despite regular economic crises and ongoing critique of the discipline, the drift from political economy into applied mathematics appears to continue unabated. In this book, Tony Lawson advocates a relignment of economics with social reality.
In analyzing mainstream economists' misplaced universality, the author places ontology at the heart of a reoriented future in which economics is integrated within the wider human and social sciences.