Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This final chapter outlines a conceptual framework called ‘anthropinism’ for understanding how particular economic events are comprehended through general meanings. It argues that meaning should be taken for granted, focusing instead on how the intelligible is articulated into conceptions that shape perception. The chapter introduces key ideas like the ‘here and now’ as a criterion for distinguishing particular from general judgements, and ‘intelligibility’ rather than determinism as the goal of economic theory. It contrasts this approach with mechanistic conceptions in economics, suggesting anthropinism can better accommodate subjective factors like expectations. The chapter proposes developing a ‘logic of subjectivism’ to codify the domain of subjectivist economic thought, drawing on ideas from Menger and Mises. It introduces the ‘coherence rule’ that questions and answers should use terms from the same domain of thought. Overall, the chapter argues for formulating economic theory in a way that maintains consistency within a subjectivist conceptual framework, rather than mixing subjective and mechanistic elements. This approach is presented as a way to develop more empirically relevant economic analysis while avoiding problematic deterministic assumptions.
This chapter explores the relationship between general economic theories and specific observations, focusing on the connection between general and particular judgements. It traces how economics has approached this issue, from inductivism to hypothesis testing, and argues that positivist methods struggle to define theory-free ‘facts’ for testing. The chapter proposes a ‘reflective attitude’ as an alternative to explanations that claim certain economic concepts, like preferences, are real or fixed. Instead of asserting that these concepts exist as definite entities, reflection focuses on how we understand and use them in analysis. This approach contrasts with deterministic views in economics that treat such concepts as unchanging. The chapter suggests that reflection can clarify how we interpret economic ideas and judgements without requiring commitment to specific claims about their reality. Through examples and logical analysis, it explains this approach and addresses possible misunderstandings, concluding that examining how we think about economic phenomena, rather than claiming what exists, can offer insight into the relationship between economic theory and observed reality. This perspective may also reveal limitations in how neo-classical theory accounts for institutional factors.
Chapter 1 introduces the central theme of examining the relationship between economic theory and observable reality, framed as the connection between the general and the particular. It provides context on mainstream equilibrium models in economics and critiques from schools like Austrian economics. The chapter outlines the approach of tracing relevant philosophical ideas and carefully analysing concepts of ‘fact’ to critique determinism and preference-field theories in economics. This analysis aims to offer a new perspective on Austrian school contentions and make constructive suggestions for economics. The introduction also discusses challenges in studying economic methodology, explains key concepts like metalanguage and units of significance, and provides an overview of major philosophical positions on the general–particular relationship, including realism, nominalism and theory-laden facts. The chapter concludes by outlining the plan for subsequent chapters.
This chapter explores the problem of similarity in the theory of knowledge, tracing its development from ancient Greek philosophy to modern epistemology. It examines how thinkers have grappled with understanding the relationship between general concepts and particular experiences. It reviews philosophical positions, including realism, nominalism, empiricism, rationalism and positivism. It discusses key ideas like Kant’s categories, theory-laden facts and the challenges of defining ‘given’ experiences. The evolution of positivism in economics is analysed, highlighting tensions between nominalist and realist elements. Recent developments in epistemology are covered, including Quine’s holism, conventionalism and Kuhn’s paradigms. The chapter emphasizes how conceptions of knowledge have shifted from seeking correspondence between ideas and external reality to examining the role of human understanding in shaping knowledge. It concludes that while the subjective re-orientation of epistemology faces criticism, it highlights important questions about the nature of objectivity in knowledge. The review provides context for examining the philosophical underpinnings and empirical content of economic theories.
This chapter examines the relationship between the subjective revolution in economics in the 1870s and the broader subjective re-orientation in western philosophy. It analyses how key figures like Jevons, Walras, Pareto and Menger incorporated subjectivism into economic theory. The chapter argues that while Jevons and Walras introduced utility in a mechanistic framework inspired by classical physics, Menger took a distinctly Aristotelian approach focused on understanding economic phenomena through their essential natures. Menger’s method emphasized identifying recurring ‘phenomenal forms’ in economics, like value and price, and deriving exact laws about their relationships. This reflected a subjectivism of the analysing subject, distinct from the subjectivism of economic agents emphasized by later Austrian economists. The chapter traces how Menger’s ideas influenced subsequent Austrian thinkers like Mises, while also noting key differences in their approaches. It concludes that Menger’s subjectivism of the subject has the clearest affinity with the broader philosophical re-orientation towards reflection, but his sharp separation of general and particular knowledge limited his ability to fully resolve the relationship between economic theory and observed facts.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Following on from The Hand Behind the Invisible Hand and A Realist Philosophy of Economics, this new book drawn from Karl Mittermaier’s writings examines the intricate relationship between economic theory and real-world economic experiences.
Despite the centrality of subjectivism in both philosophy and economics, these fields have often overlooked each other’s insights. Mittermaier challenges this disconnect, advocating for a shift from deterministic models to a more reflective approach in economics. He examines the historical, methodological and philosophical dimensions of economic theory, highlighting its struggle to connect economic theory to empirical data and individuals’ lived experiences.
Originally penned between 1979 and 1982 and now published posthumously, this work remains a crucial contribution to contemporary economic discussions.
Returning the book’s inquiry into coercion, subjectivity and inequality to the topic of debt, Chapter 5 observes that many Woldham residents acted as if ignoring their debts could enable them to get away with not paying. Against a common-sense interpretation, Chapter 5 argues they were often right. It does so by comparing residents’ practice of debt with the techniques of imagination by which they engaged with home entertainment media. Setting a scene free from distractions helped a suspension of disbelief when watching television or playing video games. So too, putting the materializations of debt ‘off-stage’ nurtured an optimism that emboldened debtors to defy lenders’ threats of enforcement. Through the fiction of acting as if it were possible to avoid enforcement and repayment simply by ignoring their debts, residents could, under certain conditions, bring that possibility into being. The ethnography shows that these practices, while often misrepresented as wrong-headed, constitute a vital struggle against coercion.
Chapter 4 shows how struggles to define value in Woldham arose not only through debt but also through parental duties of care. It thus makes a comparison between household debt and parenthood in Woldham. The two are analogous in the way residents formed their subjectivities in response to the prospect of expropriation. Following a recent punitive shift in child protection social work, state-enforced child removal was a common preoccupation among many female residents, who, as primary childcare-givers, felt social workers were predisposed to find them at fault. This arose amid politicians claiming that aspirational parenting could cure socio-economic inequality and a diffuse, gendered and classed stigmatization of working-class women. While seeking better lives for their children, the women often aimed their parenting practices towards preventing coercive interventions – a defensive kind of optimism, where their expressed ideas about being good parents and their aspirations for their children became secondary to defending against their children being removed.
The book concludes by reflecting on the significance of debt for understanding the inequalities of power in which marginalized housing estate residents are embroiled. Debt sparks a polarization of future possibilities among people living on low and precarious incomes: on the one hand, bright futures, and on the other, coercive sanctions for non-payment. The enforceable obligations pertaining to renting and parenthood have similar effects. In the processes by which those exposed to potential expropriation form their subjectivities, aspirational and defensive forms of optimism interact with and influence one another. With expropriability now a driving principle across multiple areas of policy-making in Britain, it has aided a discursive attempt to conjure an abjected ‘underclass’ into existence. And yet careful attention to personal life shows that the use of expropriation to enforce legal obligations and to assist capital accumulation also incites optimistic defences. In their daily insistence that expropriations are avoidable, many housing estate residents continually impede the imposition of that ‘underclass’ discourse onto those to whom it supposedly applies and thus subvert a new, tentatively imposed fault-line of class.
