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the analysis of stylised facts about the capitalist history. Boyer even argues that the
comprehensive theoretical provisos of regulation theory contrasts with those of
neoclassical economics which are thoroughly contradictory and ad hoc despite latter’s
invariant methodology.
Comme il faut, regulation theory like its instutionalist counterparts is against the
heuristic tentativeness of neoclassical economics. This is particularly stark in Boyer
who would consider regulation theory as a theory for ‘troubled times’. He and
through him regulation theory first polemicises upon the neoclassical understanding of
the economy as a socially disembedded system and its obscurant thinking that
Walrasian ideal of abstractly impeccable market mechanism is enough an heuristic for
the already immutable patterns and procedures of today’s economic system. Then
methodological individualism of neoclassical economics would afford another ideal,
that of the economic man. The latter is solely the counterpart abstraction to the prior
abstraction of the market; equally closed, axiomatic and socially unrealistic.
Furthermore, Boyer disagrees with the neoclassical theory of crisis. For that theory,
crisis is strictly a non sequitur; facts that are less than facts insofar as the market
mechanism in all its idealistic monism is the sole heuristic foothold for the analysis of
endogenous/systemic economic phenomena(Boyer 1990:25-6).
As opposed to this narrow study of market/price mechanisms in the abstract,
regulationists linger on the empirical contingencies of capitalist economies and
analyse certain ‘stylised facts’ about them. In fact, they study the changing
technological/technical modalities of production, labour process and social capital
together with their contradictions and historical openness because of their
social/political design. In such a theory, markets are not about the stale traffic of
proto-commodities, in fact chief elements of an economic system(labour and money)
are fictitious commodities and technological change is not exogenous to economic
analysis. Analyses of historical debut and later collectivisation/socialisation of certain
standards of production and consumption, the embeddedness of structural forms and
economic stratagems/routines(those of capital and labour) in specific and changing
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