Paradigmal Foundations for Overcoming the Crisis of Economic Theory

Abstract

The article examines the state of modern economic theory, characterized as experiencing a paradigm crisis, and describes a variety of scientific views aimed at understanding the causes of the crisis. Besides, it gives an analysis of economic paradigms that helped to get out of crises at different historical periods, as well as possible ways and prospects for overcoming the crises, which are proposed by scholars of different schools of economic thought. Attention is paid to the description of different stages of modern science - classical, neoclassical and post-non-classical – and to the evidence that proves the close correlation between the periods of economic theory development and stages of general scientific studies. The need for formation of a new economic paradigm is reasoned, the one that will have the status of meta-theory for all economic knowledge and will be based on new philosophical and methodological foundations: ontological, epistemological and axiological ones. The emphasis is on the need for an interdisciplinary approach which will help to overcome the paradigm crisis, an approach that includes methods of various sciences, but does not allow the economy to be reduced to any of these sciences. The conclusion is made about the need to apply the methodology of social philosophy to make it possible to view the science of economics through the prism of the universal, and the possibility of using an activity-based social-philosophical method as an explanatory principle.