Sixteen Questions for Fine and Milonakis

Abstract While I am in broad agreement with the main thrust of Fine’s and Milonakis’s argument, I pose sixteen questions for them. The first ten questions relate to the history of economic thought (Ricardo, Marxian economics after Marx, institutionalism in Britain); substantive issues of economic theory (their neglect of macroeconomics); methodological and philosophical matters (induction and deduction, positivism, internal and external sources of paradigm change); and the other social sciences (political science, the origins of sociology). I conclude by asking six questions about the ‘old’ and ‘new’ economics imperialism, the prospects for mainstream economics, and the precise nature of the political-economy alternative that Fine and Milonakis propose. Is it simply Marxian political economy in disguise?