Contemporary economics is characterized by a mismatch between its methods of analysis and the nature of the world it seeks to interpret. Despite regular economic crises and ongoing critique of the discipline, the drift from political economy into applied mathematics appears to continue unabated. In this book, Tony Lawson advocates a relignment of economics with social reality.

In analyzing mainstream economists' misplaced universality, the author places ontology at the heart of a reoriented future in which economics is integrated within the wider human and social sciences.