Bringing Economics into the Third Millennium

Many economists, including heterodox ones, seem unaware of the hold on and significance of the orthodox notion of economics as a ‘science’ of individual choice, the individual being conceived atomisticly. It is this idea—which pervades the economist’s mindset—that economics is the ‘science’ of the choices of isolated individuals with fixed and quantified preferences that, on the one hand, enables economics to proceed in a formalistic manner and, on the other, justifies its ignoring economic phenomena that do not fit its methodology and this narrow agenda. This chapter proposes a diagnosis and an antidote.