IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v22y1998i5p587-95.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Against Posner against Coase against Theory

Author

Listed:
  • Maki, Uskali

Abstract

In two articles published in 1993, Richard Posner characterized and vigorously attached Ronald Coase's methodological orientation. Coase resisted Posner's diagnosis, but did not provide a response. This paper offers a response which Coase might have given. One of Posner's major claims was that Coase is 'antitheoretical' or 'hostile to theory.' Here it is suggested that Posner's allegations suffer from serious unreflected ambiguities. Once we distinguish between a few different meanings of 'theory' (and 'theoreticity'), and between attitudes and accomplishments in regard to theory (or between being antitheoretical, nontheoretical, protheoretical, and theoretical), it becomes possible to argue that Coase does not hold an antitheoretical attitude even if his accomplishments fall short of theory in many (but not all) senses of the word. The larger relevance of this conflict is that its confusions tend to be characteristic of parts of the economics profession more widely. Copyright 1998 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Maki, Uskali, 1998. "Against Posner against Coase against Theory," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 22(5), pages 587-595, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:22:y:1998:i:5:p:587-95
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:22:y:1998:i:5:p:587-95. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.