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Abstract
In this review article, I take three themes from Lynne Chester and Tae-Hee Jo's edited collection Heterodox Economics: Legacy and Prospects. The first is Geoff Hodgson's critique which I summarise thus: heterodox economics lacks consensus, coordination, and organizational coherence because it lacks a definition of heterodoxy. The second and third themes are pluralism and interdisciplinarity. But pluralism has a shortcoming: even a sophisticated structured pluralism would remain within the disciplinary boundary of (heterodox) economics and, therefore, lack valuable insights found in other social science disciplines. Whilst interdisciplinarity appears to offer a solution, it too has a shortcoming: it connects disciplines, whilst leaving the boundaries between them in place. Moreover, the majority of heterodox economists know that economic phenomena are not separate from, but are entangled with, myriad social phenomena, and if so, investigation might require going beyond interdisciplinarity, perhaps to transdisciplinarity. The conclusion draws all these strands together, to consider their implications for the future prospect of heterodox economics.

In 'Approach with caution: critical realism in social research', Andrew Brown sets out a series of criticisms of critical realism from the perspective of systematic dialectics. This current article is one critical realist's reply to Brown.

Whilst terms like 'law of the tendency', 'tendency law' and 'tendential law' appear in Marxist political economy, they are unclear. This paper identifies the main conceptions of laws and tendencies and disambiguates them. Part 1 differentiates between law as (i) event regularity; (ii) event regularity/tendency; and (iii) tendency. Part 2 focuses on (ii) identifying five interpretations: tendency as a trend, cyclical variation, stochastically specified law, counterfactual event and a deliberately imprecise concept. Part 3 introduces tendency as the (transfactual) way of acting of a thing with properties. Part 4 explains why this conception of tendency is impossible to mathematise.

AbstractBen Fine and Dimitris Milonakis have done political economy a great service by drawing attention to the insights lost in the twists, turns and reductions in the transition from political economy to economics. These two volumes constitute a solid foundation upon which a new generation can build a political economy for the future. This review presses some of their meta-theoretical arguments a little further than they actually do in an attempt to 'toughen-up' the new political economy and make it more able to carry the fight to economics.

AbstractThe conceptual apparatus referred to generally as agency-structure or agency-institution is central to a great deal of social science, especially Institutional Economics. Despite its centrality, this apparatus has never been able to fully explain how institutions and social structures influence agents' intentions and actions. Economist, Geoff Hodgson and Sociologist, Margaret Archer have been at the forefront of endeavours to provide such an explanation. Section 1 of this paper elaborates upon Hodgson's ideas on institutional rules, habits, habituation, and the notion of reconstitutive downward causation. Section 2 elaborates upon Archer's ideas on structures, reflexive deliberation and the notion of an internal domain of mental primacy, and ends with a critical look at Archer's (brief) comments on rules and habits. The conclusion shows how a more nuanced understanding of structures, institutions, agency, habits, and deliberation, can inform research into a specific area, namely the analysis of labour markets.