Introduction

Alessandro Roncaglia has given us fundamental reflections on the methodological and conceptual canons that should be the cornerstones of a realistic (and at the same time, stylized) vision of how the capitalist economy behaves. Roncaglia has taught us that reconstructing the political economy on alternative methodological assumptions—in a direction opposite to the dominant neoclassical vision—involves an interpretation of history, and also of the present as history. Of course, not all of its branches or issues can be treated as a part of a comprehensive “model,” as Roncaglia frequently states. Optics that do well in one field may not be as good in another; each branch also has its technical specificity. The reconstruction can take place even in separate pieces, and can involve retrieving and updating what, of precious developed writings, one finds scattered in the critical literature on economic and social sciences. But what is important is that the methodological and epistemological apparatus maintains a uniform inspiration as well as should remain the points of reference of the analytical approach.

In what follows I devote my attention to some basic points of setting an alternative vision, knowing that on so much Roncaglia and I agree in full, but that there are minor distinctions between us.

Complexity

In a nutshell, at the base of a nonmainstream way of looking at the economy, from a descriptive and normative perspective, cannot but be social complexity, uncertainty and innovative dynamics. Through these lenses, the aggregate behavior of the economy is studied as determined by constantly evolving endogenous events, which are fed by a number of driving forces: unstable and potentially explosive relationships; nondeterministic developments; a financial system closely interconnected to the real economy but also able to acquire an autonomous dimension; and a social dynamic that changes in parallel to the whole process and that at the same time affects it.

In complex systems, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Although the representation of a society and an economy's aggregate behavior cannot ignore their components (not only individual actors but also collective and institutional ones), the interaction of these components results in an outcome that is not predictable from the parts themselves and not necessarily inferable from them. This is the opposite of the mainstream idea that the system can be observed from the standpoint of the representative agent.