D. K. Foley Ideology and Methodology 1989 page 1 Notes on Ideology and Methodology Duncan K. Foley 1. The hegemony of "mainstream" economics Current U.S. economics offers a good example of what Gramsci calls hegemony. The battles of the early twentieth century between neoclassical economics and Institutionalism and of the middle twentieth century between neoclassical economics and Keynesianism have produced a modern "mainstream" which has established its dominance in the economics departments of U.S. universities, and in our economic journals and professional organizations. Those who disagree with major premisses of the mainstream research paradigm face an uphill battle in gaining and keeping teaching posts, publishing their work, and funding their research. This mainstream is a complicated phenomenon. It inherits from the marginalist, neoclassical tradition the method of analyzing economic phenomena from an individualist point of view, seeking to explain social phenomena as the outcome of individual decisions. It has adopted a modified version of a positivist philosophy of knowledge, emphasizing, at least in principle, the need for theory and observation to develop in tandem, accepting the positivist criteria of falsifiability along with its empiricist bias. It has developed a clear research program, which takes general equilibrium theory as the paradigm of theoretical work, and seeks to explain all economic phenomena within the general equilibrium framework. This program challenges the theoretical investigator to explain economic phenomena as the general equilibrium of a model with well-specified rules of market or bargaining interaction, in which specific assumptions about tastes, resource availability, technology and information determine observable outcomes. A peculiarity of the mainstream school is its unwillingness to consider hypotheses or explanatory insights except when they are