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AbstractThis review highlights the strengths and weaknesses of three recently published useful resources for teaching economics from a pluralist and/or heterodox perspective. The introduction provides an overview of other helpful (text-)books for this purpose. Based on a historical approach, Geoffrey Schneider’s book describes and differentiates the characteristics of a broad range of economic ideas and systems. The core chapters on Smith, Marx, Veblen, and Keynes (+ Hayek) provide a brilliant concise, very well written and easily accessible overview of the plurality of major economic ideas in their historical evolution. Moreover, this explanation is shown as intricately entwined with the epochal eventful history of economic systems.

AbstractThe two books under review could not be more different in terms of their main subject matter and writing style, but their central message is exactly the same: only a pluralist economics is scientifically rigorous and explanatorily honest and fruitful. Both books underpin this important point in their own ways. While Fullbrook draws on a wide range of history of thought in economics, philosophy and the sciences, his epistemological argument is relatively easy to grasp and full of catch phrases. Marchionatti and Cedrini on the other hand review the century long methodological dispute between economists and economic anthropologists. Their treatment of these debates is very detailed. So, it can be a bit of a struggle at times to follow the intricacies of the defensive arguments used by anthropologists in their battles against imperial attacks by economists. However, by providing an outline of the basic arguments at the start and a concluding summary at the end of most of their chapters the authors make these debates very comprehensive while offering a very thorough historical comparative overview of economic imperialism and the defences of its anthropological opponents. In critiquing its philosophical foundation, Fullbrook argues convincingly that the mainstream narrative in economics is ideologically biased and conceptually too narrow to investigate economic behaviour based on social bonds, inter-subjectivity and real freedom. To allow for such analysis, he concludes, we will need to move towards true pluralism of methods in economics.

This article aims in general at further fulfilling the ambition of green economics to be a holistic paradigm synthesising and integrating a diverse set of heterodox economic approaches and philosophies. In particular, it addresses the current lack of macroeconomic and more specifically post-Keynesian short run theories in green economics. This new paradigm is in its essence a radical ecofeminist approach to economics. From this vantage point, the ecofeminist framework of (re)productivity developed by Biesecker and Hofmeister is indeed very congruent with green economics. Moreover, the goal of the article is to develop normative (ecofeminist) criteria for green stimulus packages. This could improve green economic policy formulation and real-world implementation [Turk, (2008), p.267].