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In the post-war years, economic theory developed an authority that it had seldom wielded in the past. Until the 1970s, it essentially became a research program for the theory of general economic equilibrium, and its main feature was its scientific self-sufficiency: economics allegedly owed nothing to the other social sciences. This drastically changed from the late 1980s onward. Semi-new approaches such as random and laboratory experiments and experimentalist methods have increasingly attempted to enforce the need for experimental verification on economic theory, or even to replace it with inductive constructs. Secondly, the proliferation and systematic exploitation of big data has sometimes diminished the role of economic theory as such. Finally, replacing “closed” or self-contained theoretical constructs that claim to be axiomatically rigorous to greater and lesser degrees with “open” constructs that draw on other social sciences has changed the conceptual meaning of economic theory, notably via the use of the concept of complex systems. The purpose of our contribution is to analyze these new approaches and to assess what is currently left of the utility of economic theory. JEL classification codes: A, B2, B3, B4, B5.