This short history has elucidated a key strength of heterodox economics: its pluralism. Since the Methodenstreit (battle of methods) in the nineteenth century, neoclassical economics has tended to separate itself from other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Although Schmoller, as a leading representative of the German historical school, was open to the embryonic neoclassical focus on utility maximization, he was resistant to it being used to address all economic questions: a charge he levelled at theorist Carl Menger, who sought to narrowly define selfish economic man in isolation from any historical context. No matter, for example, that women are absent from the discussion and large parts of the world population continue to suffer from the legacy of colonialism and slavery, as exemplified by the Black wealth gap; its history is expunged from narrowly defined economics.

In addition, for pioneering institutionalist Thorstein Veblen, economic man is asocial, a solitary Robinson Crusoe character stripped of his social being. To develop a fully rounded treatment of economic activity requires consideration of the community in which people live, incorporating the interface between economics and sociology. This porous approach is taken by feminist economics with, for example, an analysis of the power inequalities between men and women in the allocation of caring responsibilities. Similarly, ecological economists use sociological theories drawn from the institutional tradition of thought to examine excessive carbon use because of overconsumption. As argued by Wrenn (2018: 262), heterodox economics offers a richer and fuller “description of and explanation of the diverse range of human behaviour than that of the calculative individual in mainstream economics”.