Acknowledgements     xvi
Foreword     xviii
Introduction     1
Think again!     1
Economics in a liberating economy     4
The idea of Critical Political Economy     6
A self-undermining orthodoxy     8
The new aims of political economy     10
The mainstream use of economic models     12
Economic knowledge as a tool for action     15
Plan of the book     17
Uncritical complexity     21
Uncritical atoms: the limits of standard economics     23
Two basic questions     24
A tradition of social criticism     26
The anti-emancipatory inversion of standard economics     31
Homo economicus and reflexive social change: study of a constitutive impossibility     39
Looking for homo criticus     54
Uncritical mass: the limits of complexity economics     56
The bottom-up irrelevance of standard economics     57
Post-Walrasian approaches     61
The structure of complexity economics     63
The suicide of the critical subject     74
The use of uncritical knowledge in society     82
The Hayekian heritage of complexity economics     82
Theorist's ignorance, agents' ignorance     84
The competitive process as a real-time "theory"     89
Competition and "spontaneous consciousness"     92
From co-evolution to co-reflection     96
Bottom-up Critical Theory: the logic of self-criticizing complexity     103
The use of critical knowledge about society     105
Creating a potential for social emancipation     105
"Superstition" and the control of social forces     113
Critically oriented interaction and "conscious spontaneity"     129
The unavoidable necessity of critical rationality     133
Bottom-up Critical Theory: what does economics describe?     139
Toward a bottom-up Critical Theory     139
End-state versus process     151
"Critical descriptiveness": what does economics describe?     154
A self-criticizing economic system     162
Emancipation in complex systems     164
From "spontaneous consciousness" to "conscious spontaneity"     174
Toward a theory of self-criticizing systems     181
To what real economy do we aspire?     193
Toward a critical mainstream?     195
A formal approach to critically rational action     197
Why normative economics needs other foundations     197
The spread of critical ideas in complex economic systems     201
Can normative economics become emancipation-oriented?     217
Which characteristic emergents do we want?     220
Breaching the positivelnormative divide     224
Critical Political Economy: the logic of "post-orthodox" pluralism     229
The use of economics in a complex economy     231
The economist as participant observer     231
A self-criticizing economics in a self-criticizing economy     235
The individual use of economic theories     239
Path dependence, variety, and ignorance     240
Opportunistic consultants     247
The dynamics of theory diffusion and the Hayek-Fukuyama theorem     249
Critical consultants and the Horkheimer-Marcuse theorem     251
Free-economy economics     256
An economics that reflects on itself     256
Economics as an intrinsically political discipline     258
Another "Purple Rose of Cairo"?     267
Post-orthodox pluralism in economics     275
Economic theory and local knowledge     275
The thorny issue of "economic literacy"     278
Critical Political Economy: an ideal curriculum      281
Knowledge institutions in a genuinely liberating economy     285
Dominant paradigm or neutral language?     288
The most lucid way ahead     289
Taking the "CPE test"     291
Notes     293
Bibliography     295
Index     306