Fundamentos metodológicos da complexidade econômica e o pensamento contemporâneo de Adam Smith

Abstract

This thesis aims to substantiate methodologically approach the complexity in Economic Science in consideration of contemporary economic theory of Adam Smith. Complex thinking reflects a contemporary effort by researchers in different strands to criticize the characteristic limitations of the paradigmatic reductionist line of modern thought. On the other hand, Adam Smith is considered as the first great thinker within the Economy while it is used as the basis of the argumentation of Economic Science as an exact and objective field of scientific investigation. This work aims to counter this perspective by highlighting the incipience of the complex thinking in Adam Smith through the re-reading of his main works, based on the scientific framework that protected him. Therefore, segments into three chapters. The first grounded methodologically the modern reductionist scientific paradigm, with emphasis on the contributions of René Descartes and Isaac Newton, bases for the consolidation of the scientific criterion in a generalized way. In addition, it discusses the fundamentals and characteristics of the complexity approach and the acknowledged advances in relation to the reductionism in its capacity to apprehend socioeconomic phenomena. The second chapter focuses on the thinking of Adam Smith and is divided into three points. The first exposes the reductionist interpretation of his ideas, systematized by the Neoclassical Economic School. The second and third are dedicated to the interpretation of complex elements in his works, let us say the conception of subject and incompleteness of the non-social being in Theory of Moral Sentiments and the understanding of the enrichment process of Nations as a phenomenon of complex nature, in the Wealth of Nations, respectively. The third chapter deals with the contemporary aspect of Economic Complexity, with emphasis on the evolutionary line and the focus of complex networks of trade, which are close to methodically through the basics of complex thinking and demonstrate a rescue and today Adam of economic thought Smith.