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The article presents several papers related developments in economics as realist social theory. According to the author, social theory expressly committed to work out the nature of social being, and, or how people access social reality is going through something of a revival in economics. The papers presented, provide numerous results, arguments, conjectures, and critiques have been produced in recent years, and aim to take some of these specific developments further. Context of the papers and basic ideas and results are presented.

For the St. Louis meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society, the author organized a special session to reflect on the particular sociological tradition associated with Washington University, with a particular focus on Alvin Gouldner's work. From that session came this symposium, for which various papers presented were developed into articles. The session and these articles raise important issues for what they tell us both about Gouldner's work and about where sociology is as a discipline today. Among these issues are (1) the optimistic quest for objective value-free knowledge positivism entailed in the past versus a self-reflexive quest for knowledge that entails a tragic acceptance of its limits at presents, (2) the effort to distinguish social theory from sociology, ideology, and politics, with all of whom it overlaps as they strive to be both social diagnosis and social therapy, (3) the production of knowledge as dependent both on the lived experiences that shape our biographies and on the intellectual influences available in the local settings where we work, (4) the effort to warn us against the various accesses to which our disciplinary and personal commitments give way, and (5) the role social theory can play as a search light that illuminates our way in the darkness of the empirical world in which we live, while it simultaneously casts a shadow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the nature of critical theory, its historical development, its connections to sociology and Marxism, and the central debates over its core ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the growing number of analysts who employ the world system perspective on national development, theoretical disagreements have evolved which may only be settled by examination of available data. Using an adaptation of the network metaphor, this paper blockmodels the world trade system in order (1) to demonstrate a single mode of international exchange in the world system instead of the competing capitalist and communist modes proposed by some, and (2) to illustrate the unique position of the middle level of nations in a three tier world system—a position sometimes denied. Implications for the competing world system theories and world development itself are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karl Marx's sociology has been interpreted incorrectly as the consequence of the application of a "dialectical" method to social phenomenon. In this paper, I discuss his actual method of theory construction (a rather more complicated phenomenon than the simple reversal of the Hegelian dialectic), the Ricardian method of successive approximations. This method involves three steps or stages—observation, model formation, and model testing and revision. Marx's Capital is reviewed in the light of his use of this method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorizing in economics is often associated with some form of individualism. This paper considers the nature of this association in the work of Carl Menger. I adopt this focus not only because of continuing interest in Menger's work, but because recent developments in social theory facilitate a fruitful reevaluation of his general position. I argue that a convincing link between theory and individualism is absent in Menger's work. Moreover, I argue that the various criticisms often made of his work actually relate to the ideas which underlie his individualism rather than, as is usually supposed, those arising from an adherence to a form of Aristotelianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]