No new revolution in economics? Taking Thompson and fine forward.

The basic thesis of this paper is that Ben Fine and Grahame Thompson's 1999 exchange on economics imperialism illustrates two positions that talk across each other. Fine's approach to understanding the field of mainstream economics combines methodological analysis of theoretical innovation and a broad critical sociology. Thompson's response to Fine combines methodological analysis of practical and theoretical problems that currently inhibit the mainstream with a broad pluralist/pragmatist philosophical position. Analysing each position provides a useful way to develop the issues at stake in the debate - specifically, what are the potentials and ramifications of mainstream economics? We argue that mainstream economics does have real tendencies conducive to expansion. Its discursive constitution is dualistic (defining its limits but with an insignificant outside) and knows no genuine boundary. It has also been engaged in a process of eliminating alternatives within economics that have traditionally emphasized the very concepts that seemingly form the basis of current innovation. This implies that the basis of innovation cannot simply be one of a realization of explanatory failure resulting in a positive transformation of the field that also happens to be conducive to imperialism in an even more effective way than prior imperialist tendencies have afforded. At the same time, whether mainstream economics and its imperial tendencies are negative remains an open yet determinable issue, one we illustrate through an analysis of information-theoretic economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]