Systems Reproduction in Interdisciplinary Perspective

By far the most dominant approach in the social sciences, particularly in economics, is a fundamentally ahistorically constructed theory of equilibrium, in which the actions of elements are conceived of as being voluntary. Apart from a reduction in the scope of the approach, resulting in momentary images being taken as the explanation, both of the whole and as a description and evaluation towards ends, the extensive loss of the historical dimension, the elimination of the parameter of time in the prevailing social sciences has resulted in the virtual disappearance of the analysis of economic and social development from theoretical discourse. Furthermore, this does not seem quite so strange when one considers Parson’s maxim that the ‘task of every scientific theory is to conceptually reduce what is changeable to what is constant’,1 a view which can be regarded as representative of the access to the mainstream. This prevailing approach in economics is reflected in the ‘classical system theories in sociology’. The latter regard social change ‘in the sense of a structural change as a disruption of a normally stable social equilibrium’.2 Despite the wish, for example in economic theory, to regard such constructions as indispensable: ‘as a standard with which the given state of the economic organism can be investigated and, where possible, evaluated’,3 and an ever greater emphasis on logical and highly formalised mathematical consistency, the ever-decreasing proximity to reality, as far as the provision of meaning and operationality is concerned, can no longer be overlooked.