Outline

This book, entering in the economic crisis debate, constitutes a kind of crucial turn in that debate. Studying in depth the thinking strand of some great economist group of the second half of XX century – today rather forgotten – as Frisch, Tinbergen, Johansen, Leontiev, and others; and the contribution of an other disciplinary side, that of the ‘planning theorists’, Franco Archibugi develops and perfects the concept – before frischian – of ‘programming approach’, and integrates it with the concept of ‘decision-centered analysis’, (developed by the planning and operational research theorists).
In the frame of the epistemological critique of the whole social sciences ‘positivism’ (intended as human behavior sciences), critique already converged in the Gunnar Myrdal works, Franco Archibugi develop in this book the thesis of the ‘end’ of economics; and of the birth, at its place, of a socio-economic integrated policy, oriented directly to the action and programming, through a problem-solving approach, free from ‘positivistic’ constraints , i.e. based on cognitive coefficients or parameters bounded to the past and not towards the future.
It is question of a turn, already theorized by Ragnar Frisch, concerning the use, in the social sciences (therefore in economics) of ‘decisional models’ instead of ‘descriptive models’; and it is question of a methodological consciusness that a missed clear choice between the ones and the others, and a mixed use of them, generate misleading and wrong conclusions (a ‘half logic’, as was called by Frisch).
From this ‘turn’, Franco Archibugi postulates a reappraisal in the XXI century of the social sciences, as their way out from the present ‘crisis’, and as their true scientific reclamation. It’s question even of the revival of that ‘unified approach to planning’, strongly demanded – at dawning of present globalization – by some Resolutions of the United Nations in the 50’ and 60’ of the past century; the recovery of those development that have been stopped and dispersed in the academic shoals of the inter-disciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches (which increased instead decreases the disciplinary separation) , when it could and should have taken off only through a meta-disciplinary or neo-disciplinary approach, that Archibugi names ‘planning science’ or ‘planology.
Thus, this book traces the basic critical lines of the new discipline.

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