Orthodox Economics: Its Meaning, Concepts and Characteristics

Economics is a science in which a lot of intellectual traditions have emerged, raised and declined. All these bodies of doctorine aspired to the name of economic theory. Among these systems of thought, following marginalistic revolution, a tradition emerged, called by veblen "neoclassical economics" which was later came to be known as orthodox economics, because of its power and dominance.
Besides the term "orthodox", another term that makes matters somewhat vague is "mainstream". This paper focuses on the study of meaning and concept of "orthodox economics" and explores whether there is any differences between mainstream and orthodox economics. Indeed the main contribution of this paper is to put some doubt on the views of some economists, like Lawson, who have claimed that orthodox economics is not lively and refering to it would be useless. In contrast, this paper tries to reveal that although the emergence of different intellectual traditions is a fact in mainstream economics, orthodox economics has the lion's share in it. That leads us to this conclusion that in additio to mainstream emphasis on mathematics, which is, according to Lawson, the most important characteristic of mainstream economics, this tradition didn't desist some other characteristics. For example, among other things, we can underline the followings: methodological individualism, equilibrium-seeking, and optimization. The findings of this article have some other momentousness, that is, according to them, we can draw a relatively better seperating line between heterodox and orthodoxy economics.
JEL Classifications: C14, C32, D53