There is a certain comfort in imagining knowledge as a single tree, its trunk rising solid and straight, its branches expanding but never diverging too far. This is how many see the history of economics — as a growth of unified insight, branching predictably toward truth.
But what if the field of economics is not one tree, but a forest?
Not a single melody, but a symphony — sometimes dissonant, often unresolved, forever plural?
This is the spirit of the competitive view, a way of understanding economic thought not as a smooth ascent or accumulation, but as an ongoing contest between paradigms — each built on different visions of the world, each offering a distinct language for what the economy is and what it might become.
Breaking the Mirror of Consensus
The competitive view rises in rebellion against the dominant narrative of unilinear progress. It asserts — with clarity, but without anger — that economics has never been a singular story. What we call “theories” are not cumulative steps toward an objective end, but propositions rooted in worldviews, histories, and value systems.
Thomas Kuhn called them paradigms — not just different answers, but different questions, different assumptions, different metaphors. Imre Lakatos saw them as research programs — intellectual architectures that shape what we explore, and how we judge success.
Within this view, economics is not a settled science polishing details. It is a living dialogue, sometimes a debate, often a competition — not of ego, but of perspective.
Visions That Do Not Add Up
The classical economists, from Smith to Ricardo to Marx, asked: how does a society produce and distribute its surplus? Their model was one of classes and production, of cycles and transformation.
The marginalists, by contrast, focused on the isolated agent, calculating marginal gains at the point of decision. Utility became the new cornerstone, equilibrium the guiding light.
These are not different versions of the same story. They are different stories.
You cannot simply fold Marx into Walras, or Sraffa into Samuelson. Their frameworks are not chapters in a novel — they are different genres entirely. One may write in realism, the other in abstraction. One might attend to the structure of power, the other to the elegance of curves.
The competitive view says: let them all speak. Let them stand in tension. Let the richness of disagreement sharpen our sense of what is at stake.
Misunderstood Progress
In a cumulative world, progress is measured in how closely we align with the “latest” model — the frontier of technique, the edge of consensus. All else is background.
But in a competitive view, progress is more difficult — and more honest. It is not about replacing old truths with new ones, but expanding the landscape of insight. It is the recognition that no single framework can capture the whole of economic life.
Markets are real — but so are institutions. Preferences matter — but so do power, culture, and history. Rationality explains — but so does uncertainty, identity, and memory.
Each research tradition illuminates a part of the whole. None should be mistaken for the whole itself.
The Practice of Pluralism
To embrace the competitive view is not to glorify relativism. Not all theories are equally explanatory, equally careful, or equally applicable. But it is to admit that the standards by which we judge theories are themselves born within theories. The criteria of coherence, simplicity, or empirical fit depend on the assumptions we bring.
In economics, as in life, the tools we choose shape the world we see.
The competitive view urges us to examine those tools, not as settled technology but as artifacts of vision. It invites us to compare theories not by who “won,” but by what they make visible — and what they leave in shadow.
This view does not weaken economic science. It humanizes it. It restores the sense that economics is not just a technical endeavor, but a moral and philosophical one — a choice about how we see people, relationships, work, and worth.
Listening Across Divides
There is something deeply democratic in the competitive view.
It insists that dissent is not an inconvenience, but a resource. That the presence of rival theories is not evidence of failure, but of vitality. That intellectual monocultures are dangerous, and intellectual biodiversity is necessary — not just for creativity, but for resilience.
When we allow different paradigms to coexist, we make space for humility. We train ourselves not to dismiss the unfamiliar, but to inquire: why do they see the world that way? What do they notice that I have not?
This is not easy. It requires patience. It requires the courage to be uncertain. It demands, above all, a faith in conversation — even when the terms of the conversation are contested.
A Quiet Return
Perhaps, in the end, the competitive view is less a doctrine than a disposition.
A disposition toward complexity. Toward openness. Toward the idea that truth in economics — like in art, or ethics — is not a fixed point, but a horizon we circle.
In The Wealth of Ideas, Roncaglia does not declare war on the mainstream. He simply reopens the door to others who were once inside. He reminds us that Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, that Keynes struggled with uncertainty, that Marx’s critique was not a footnote to Ricardo but a reimagining of the whole economic order.
The competitive view asks us to bring them all back into the room — not as relics, but as interlocutors.
Because the questions we face today — inequality, sustainability, instability, meaning — require more than one kind of mind.
“There are many mansions in the house of economics.”
Not all are built alike. Some are modest, some grand, some still under construction.
But the truth we seek may not dwell in one alone — it may emerge in the space between them, if we are willing to listen.