Volume 11, Issue 3 (12-2025)
فصلنامه تحقیقات بنیادین علوم انسانی 2025, 11(3): 80-80 |
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Rafieiatani A. Capacities and Limitations of the Conventional Homo Economicus Model and Prospects for Its Reconstruction within a Metatheoretical Framework. فصلنامه تحقیقات بنیادین علوم انسانی 2025; 11 (3) :80-80
URL: http://frh.sccsr.ac.ir/article-1-710-en.html
URL: http://frh.sccsr.ac.ir/article-1-710-en.html
Abstract: (5 Views)
The model of Homo Economicus has constituted a central subject of mainstream economics for more than two centuries. By emphasizing individualism, instrumental rationality, and self-interest, it has provided a coherent foundation for formalization, mathematical modeling, and the prediction of economic behavior. Nevertheless, reducing the human being to a self-reliant, calculating, and self-interested agent has excluded important dimensions of actual human behavior, as well as the individual’s relations with society, nature, and values, from the scope of economic analysis. Accordingly, heterodox approaches—including behavioral economics, institutional economics, ecological economics, and humanistic economics—have each sought to address particular shortcomings of the conventional model. Yet these approaches have generally offered partial revisions focused on specific dimensions of economic behavior and have paid less attention to an integrated reconstruction of the anthropological foundations of economics.Using a metatheoretical approach and a critical-comparative method, this article examines both the capacities and limitations of the conventional model of economic man, together with the major revisions proposed by competing theories. The purpose of this approach is not to reject the existing theoretical tradition altogether, but rather to identify the domain of validity of each theory and to reposition it within a broader framework encompassing ontological, epistemological, and methodological foundations. The main finding of the study is that existing theories each capture particular aspects of the multidimensional reality of the human being; however, the development of a more comprehensive model requires a metatheory capable of integrating individuality, rationality, interests, social relations, the natural environment, and the normative and teleological dimensions of human action within a coherent framework. On this basis, drawing on Islamic sources of knowledge may provide the conceptual capacity required for such a reconstruction—one in which the economic agent is understood as a responsible actor in relation to the self, society, nature, and God, and as possessing a more realistic understanding of both the self and the world that shapes economic action. Such a reconstruction may provide the theoretical basis for the development of a more realistic, ethical, and comprehensive economics.
Keywords: Homo Economicus, capacities and limitations of Homo Economicus, heterodox economics, metatheory, Islamic economics.
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