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.
This chapter takes a long-run view on how preindustrial political economy conceptualized, regulated and designed markets in the age of capitalism’s ascendancy. Drawing on select treatises from the scholastics to later ordoliberalism, the chapter examines how people framed and configured market economy and capitalism over the longer run. Often these entailed a physical-spatial dimension, from the layout of market stalls to the hours of market access and trading times. Features of these long-gone political economies continued to shape European economic practices to the present day. And they helped achieve long-term economic growth.
This chapter moves on to another field of empowering capitalism in the preindustrial age, looking at origins of creativity in manufacturing. It does so through a focus on economic writings and ideas. During the Renaissance, manufacturing became conceptualized as the main source of the wealth of nations. Somewhat unoriginally – given that many other authors had used the example as a case in point before – Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) commences with the example of a (pin) manufactory. But rather than discussing the full implications in terms of value-added and creativity, Smith chose to proceed by demonstrating that the true origin of wealth lay in the division of labour, improving the distributional efficiency of the existing market systems. But even for a preindustrial economy – Smith’s template of analysis – this wasn’t completely the case; political economy had much more in stock. Smith thus missed a great opportunity – where did the wealth of nations originate?
This chapter looks at a neglected conceptual history of capitalism’s temporalities. Knowing about the future has been one of the key ingredients of economic modernity. In modern capitalism the future is unknown but principally open, plannable and manageable. At least, that is the illusion, the conviction that humans equipped with instruments of reason, rationality and science may make reasonable forecasts about their future. Notions of an economic future had existed since the Middle Ages. The commercial revolutions in business, banking and commerce that had paved the material foundations of the Italian Renaissance cannot be imagined without some sort of future vision. But these were limited to specific actors and types of activities. Post-1600 models were different. They extended the realm of actors and number of individual open futures, desacralizing the human future from the general biblical context, within which most future visions before 1600 had firmly rested.
Laying out argument and context for the book, the chapter argues that the history of modern capitalism and economic development commenced in the Renaissance. Contrary to many modern scholarly myths, capitalism was neither invented in the Anglosphere or the Netherlands, nor was capitalism a ‘second language’ to continental newcomers. There is an oft-acclaimed modern myth going back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that claims that commerce and trade established the foundations for modern good governance, but in fact it was the other way round. Governance and economic order provided the foundations for economic development, and since the Renaissance a rich political economy literature – often subsumed under labels such as ‘mercantilism’ or ‘cameralism’ – had emerged that provided the key political-economic foundations for positive economic development. Looking at the experiences of the early modern German-speaking lands – which were radically different from the British (and Dutch) way in neither tune nor practice – I aim to rehabilitate the contributions made by continental mercantilist-cameralist political economy laying the foundations of capitalism and modern economic growth in the longue durée.
