Crisis System ─ A Critical Realist and Environmental Critique of Economics and the Economy

Informed by critical realist ontology, this proposed book will throw light on the nature and causes of three different, but strongly interconnected crises currently ravaging contemporary societies worldwide: an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, and a normative (or moral and political) crisis of an unjust and profoundly inequitable distribution of wealth, resources and life-opportunities.

The global system of production and consumption is in profound crisis economically, ecologically as well as socially, morally and politically. Moreover it is on a highly unsustainable trajectory measured against all dimensions of sustainable development. The book will follow the roots of the different manifestations of the global crisis back to an inherent dynamics in the capitalist economic system itself as well as to its main discursive expression: neoclassical economics.

Being nearly immune to critical inputs from other disciplines, mainstream economic theory has been characterized as ‘autistic’ by some critics. With its unshakable faith in a set of axioms which can be shown to have been disproved by other sciences as well as by currently heterodox currents within it, the discipline of economics arguably belongs to the realm of myth and superstition rather than to a faculty of social science.

Roy Bhaskar is the originator of the philosophy of critical realism, and the author of many acclaimed and influential works including A Realist Theory of Science, The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, Plato Etc., From Science to Emancipation and (with Mervyn Hartwig) The Formation of Critical Realism. He is an editor of Critical Realism: Essential Readings and Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change and was the founding chair of the Centre for Critical Realism. He is currently a World Scholar at the University of London Institute of Education.

Karl-Georg Hoyer is Professor and Research Director at Oslo University College. He holds a Master’s Degree in technology and a PhD in social sciences with a dissertation on "Sustainable Mobility”. Most of Hoyer’s research is related to sustainable development, with a main focus on transport and energy.

Petter Nass is Professor in Urban Planning at Aalborg University, Denmark, with part-time position at Oslo University College, Norway. Main research interests: land use and travel; impacts and driving forces of urban development; philosophy of science. His most recent book is Urban Structure Matters (Routledge, 2006).