Abstract

This paper tries to deepen the notion of isolation in Tony Lawson´s Critical Realism and its relation with his position on the use of mainstream economic models to access the social world. I distinguish the notion of isolation and abstraction in this author. I show that the consideration of the complexity of social reality is related to his position on the role of isolation to reach it. Lawson´s social ontology is central to establish what the role is that isolation performs in the knowledge of the social realm. There is, in this author, a pre-eminence of the ontological over the theoretical. How the world is determines the methodological possibilities to know it.