Contending epistemic orders: A systematic review of the philosophical and epistemological foundations of contemporary Indonesian economic thought

Cecep Bryan Firdaus ()
Additional contact information
Cecep Bryan Firdaus: University of Melbourne

Journal of Economic Epistemology and Philosophy, 2026, vol. 1, issue 2, 1-30

Abstract: The philosophy of economics has rarely asked how economic knowledge is formed, justified and applied in a plural, Muslim-majority, post-authoritarian developing society, despite Indonesia's formative role in twentieth-century debates over the cultural scope of economic theory. This article systematically reviews contemporary scholarship on the philosophical and epistemological foundations of Indonesian economic thought. Following SPAR-4-SLR and PRISMA 2020, a Scopus-derived corpus of 55 records (retrieved 4 September 2026) was screened to 44 eligible studies, profiled descriptively and synthesised through critical interpretive synthesis around the concept of epistemic orders: socially sustained configurations of epistemic authority, anthropology of the economic agent, conception of the economic good and institutional carriers. Six orders structure the literature: constitutional–nationalist, Islamic–theological, customary–communal, technocratic–market, structural–institutionalist and juridical–procedural. Fifty-nine per cent of studies invoke two orders, and hybrid frameworks proliferate in halal governance and state-enterprise reform. The field is juridified: 17 of 44 studies appear in law journals and doctrinal analysis is the modal method, so that questions about economic truth are posed as questions about legal certainty. Warrants are methodologically segregated—quantitative evidence serves only the technocratic order, ethnography the customary order, doctrine the Islamic and juridical orders—so that hybridisation occurs at the level of concepts rather than evidence. The article offers the first systematic mapping of post-Reformasi Indonesian economic thought as an epistemological field, proposes a typology of inter-order interaction (subsumption, hybridisation, translation and contestation) and sets out a research agenda for a philosophy of economics attentive to plural orders of justification in the Global South. Keywords : philosophy of economics; epistemic pluralism; Pancasila economics; Islamic economics; legal pluralism; moral economy; Indonesia; systematic literature review

Keywords: philosophy of economics; epistemic pluralism; Pancasila economics; Islamic economics; legal pluralism; moral economy; Indonesia; systematic literature review (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journal.privietlab.org/download.php?id=13645 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:prv:jeeppv:2259

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://journal.priv ... EP/article/view/2259

DOI: 10.55942/jeep.v1i2.2259

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Economic Epistemology and Philosophy from Privietlab Research Center
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mochammad Fahlevi ().