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In 1982 my book Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the Twentieth Century was published. At the 2017 History of Economics Society meeting, a session was held to mark the 35th anniversary of that event. Papers by Wade Hands, Kevin Hoover, Tony Lawson, and the trio Peter Boettke, Solomon Stein, and Virgil Storr were prepared. In this paper, I respond by reflecting on how I came to write Beyond Positivism and on the state of the field of economic methodology at the time, and then commenting briefly on each of the papers noted above.

When Beyond Positivism was published 35 years ago, it presented a compelling case for methodological change in the economics profession. That case remains equally compelling in the present day as, tragically, economics remains largely without the methodological pluralism at the heart of Beyond Positivism’s message. Among the costs of an environment of methodological myopia are widespread misinterpretations and the diversion of scholars from efforts at economic understanding to methodological wrangling, which we illustrate using the experience of Austrian economics in the 20th century. Beyond Positivism, we suggest, continues to provide the intellectual case for a pluralist discipline of economics, but one that requires complementary institutional reforms to come to fruition.

Max Weber and the Austrian School of Economics share many of the same intellectual influences as well as a similar commitment to a social science characterized by methodological individualism, methodological subjectivism, and value-freedom. Although many of the links between Weber and the Austrian school have been explored, one area of agreement between Weber and Mises that is yet to be explored is their shared understanding of the nature of the market. This chapter attempts to close this gap by examining the pictures of the market in Weber’s Economy and Society and Mises’ Human Action. We find that both portrayals share important features. These include similarities regarding (i) the nature of the market; (ii) the market’s autonomous logic; (iii) the impersonality of the market; and (iv) the market in society.

This chapter integrates the motivation phenomenon of goal hierarchy and equifinality into the employee resilience conceptualization to highlight adaptive manifestations of resilience to failure at work. Experienced failure offers an important context to consider adaptive resilience, as failure may offer feedback that pre-failure strategies will not lead to higher-level goal accomplishment; making lower-level goal changes critical for success. This chapter offers a fine-gained presentation of what employee resilience does (and does not entail), to address current concerns about: (a) a lack of agreement concerning what “positive adaptation” means; and (b) potential dangers in the unknowing encouragement of maladaptive resilience after failure (e.g., harms to employee well-being and success). Here, goal revision or abandonment at a lower-level of one’s goal hierarchy, as opposed to higher-level goal abandonment, is presented as a form of adaptive employee resilience. This change places the focus of employee resilience on perseverance toward big picture goals, rather than traits or outcomes associated with perseverance; which helps to further distinguish resilience from related concepts, antecedents, and outcomes. This conceptual clarity is useful in furthering the nomological network development of resilience, and better equips researchers and practitioners for assessing and promoting adaptive resilient responses to failure.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.