These volumes represent the second and last installment of my collected papers and chapters on economics. The first installment – The Visionary Realism of German Economics. From the Thirty Years’ War to the Cold War – was published in 2019, also then kindly collected and edited by Prof. Rainer Kattel of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, University College London.

¡Viva el tercer extremismo! was once the only text in a mail I received from a Latin American friend: ‘long live the third extremism’. My friend and I are both what you can call children of the Cold War, born at its start in the late 1940s and spending many formative and active years under its reign until 1989. His point was that my form of extremism, instead of becoming a rigid ideology, was a rather extreme attention to historical facts and the tools and mechanisms they revealed. Indeed, I was very pleased when I found that an influential German economist, Gustav Schmoller, had referred to communism and what was to become neoliberalism as ‘twins of an ahistorical rationalism’1. My ‘extremism’ was intended to be the opposite, hopefully a ‘historical rationalism’, which by necessity had to be more complex than the simplistic solutions of the ‘ahistorical twins’ which dominated the Cold War view.

With time, I found that several approaches qualified as not belonging to any of the ‘ahistorical twins’ that dominated Cold War economics. I came to think of these as ‘reality economics’, but a philosophical discussion started within the group around ‘reality’ and we decided to adopt the term The Other Canon of Economics: the study of the economy as a real object, not defined in terms of the adoption of core assumptions and techniques. The end of this introduction provides a comparison between standard economics and The Other Canon, listing many economists who have provided input to The Other Canon. A family tree of The Other Canon is found here http://othercanon .org /family -tree/

The beginning of the Cold War brought a massive theoretical contradiction to the surface. We could call it Marshall vs. Samuelson. On June 5, 1947, US secretary of state George Marshall presented what was originally called ‘The European Recovery Plan’, later the ‘Marshall Plan’.