Cambridge Economics, Heterodoxy and Ontology: An Interview with Tony Lawson

Abstract

Over the past two decades the Cambridge economist Tony Lawson has been a leading advocate for an ontological turn in economics, as well as a main contributor to the specific methodological framework sometimes systematised as critical realism. On a sunny afternoon on 17 June 2000, Lawson and I talked at length in his Cambridge garden about his own intellectual history, his interconnecting relationships with the Cambridge Economics Faculty, his views on methodology and philosophy, and his relation to the heterodox traditions in economics, focusing on Post Keynesianism in particular. What follows is an edited and abridged version of that discussion.