Interpreting the capitalist order before and after the marginalist revolution
比较古典政治经济学与边际主义经济学对资本主义秩序的不同解释，基于托尼·劳森的社会本体论，分析社会定位概念如何被方法论个体主义取代。
In this article I compare the approaches to process and order of classical political economy and marginalist economics, taking into account the implicit ontological commitments of each perspective in their explanation of capitalism. I draw on the social ontology developed by Tony Lawson, especially the notion of social positioning. The classical political economists studied the capitalist economy as a process of reproduction and distribution of the economic surplus, where socio-economic order depends on the division of society into social classes. After the marginal revolution, the classical approach is definitely abandoned, in a context where the analysis of human institutions in terms of social positions is progressively replaced by methodological individualism. This leads to a conception where the notion of socio-economic order is interpreted always in terms of market exchange between individuals, and in many cases replaced with a concern with the stability of an equilibrium situation.