Plato’s disease

http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2007/11/19/relevance-and-practice/

I have on order “How Economics Forgot History” by Hodgson.

It seems that social science disciplines suffer from “Plato’s disease.” There is the belief that behind all of the noise there are same basic abstract principles that unify the discipline, and the goal of research is to discover those grand principles.

The trouble is that by looking at more and more abstract principles, one becomes more and more detached from messing and complex reality, which may be a problem if unifying abstract principles do not exist and all that is “real” is messy reality.