Abstract/Summary

The Cambridge Social Ontology (CSO) programme’s inability to generate a meaningful dialogue with mainstream economics is difficult to understand by mere reference to judgmental rationality and without reference to CSO’s ideological configuration. Our paper uses an économie des conventions framework to draw systematic comparisons between CSO’s ideological configuration and the ideological configurations of mainstream economic theories and practice. The resulting analysis helps us to understand not only why CSO generated little response from the mainstream, but also how CSO might renew its critique in ways that might be more likely to produce a response.