Mainstream economics, heterodoxy and academic exclusion: a review essay

Does the mainstream of economic thinking and analysis tend systematically to exclude ideas and approaches that could enrich the field, and, as a consequence, have important questions and issues been shunted aside for nonobjective reasons? Two recent volumes by heterodox economists that address these questions are Geoffrey Hodgson's How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science, and Steve Keen's Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences. I evaluate their claims of academic exclusion and assess the current state of (selective) pluralism within mainstream economics.