History and economics: an impossible marriage

In The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945, 2010

The seminar is divided in three distinct sections that focus on the historical and methodological dimensions of economics as an autonomous science. The first section is intended to provide an overview of the history of economic ideas, from ancient and medieval to early modern economic thought and classical political economy. The second section explores the methodological controversies accompanying the rise of Economics to the status of an autonomous and well-articulated academic discipline. The particular relationship between Economics with other cognitive areas such as physics, biology and psychology, are also taken into thorough consideration. The third part investigates a set of contemporary critical approaches that seek to challenge established paradigms and traditions of economic reasoning in mainstream economics.

Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, 2018

Since the Second World War, economists have often claimed that their discipline developed largely independently of other social sciences until it got closer to them again from the 1980s onward. Taking the story back to the end of the First World War, we show that there exists a rich history of interactions in which economists have learned from other social sciences. In the interwar period, attempts to promote interdisciplinarity were made to offset the shortcomings of too much disciplinary specialization but they concerned individual economists, notably institutionalists, more than economics as a whole. From the Second World War and in the two decades following it, the social sciences entered a cross-disciplinary age. Foundations, university administrators and scholars regarded multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research as the key to solving social problems. Economists worked alongside mathematicians and natural scientists but they also participated in crossdisciplinary research ventures with other social scientists, an experience that often led them to depart from homo economicus and more generally from methodologies commonly taken to characterise economics. From the late 1960s, with the shift towards greater specialization, the interactions with other social scientists enjoyed less support and opportunity; they became much rarer and more individually driven, but remained significant as illustrated by the emergence and consolidation of behavioural economics.

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2009

In a new major work of critical recollection, Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine show how economics was once rich, diverse, multidimensional and pluralistic. The book details how political economy became economics through the desocialisation and dehistoricisation of the dismal science, accompanied by the separation of economics from other social sciences, especially economic history and sociology. It ranges over the shifting role of the historical and the social in economic theory, the shifting boundaries between the economic and the non-economic, all within a methodological context. Schools of thought and individuals, that have been neglected or marginalised, are treated in full, including classical political economy and Marx, the German and British Historical Schools, American institutionalism, Weber and Schumpeter and their programme of Sozialökonomik, and the Austrian School. Developments within the mainstream tradition from marginalism through Marshall and Keynes to general equilibrium theory are also scrutinised, and the clashes between the various camps from the famous Methodenstreit of the 1880s to the fierce debates of the 1930s and beyond brought to the fore. The prime rationale underpinning this account is to put the case for political economy back on the agenda. This is done by treating economics as a social science once again. It involves transcending the boundaries of the social sciences through the reintroduction and full incorporation of the social and the historical into the main corpus of political economy, by drawing on the rich traditions of the past. Economists, advanced students and researchers engaged in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of economic phenomena, scholars interested in the history of economic thought, economic historians and other social scientists will find this book of compelling interest.

History of Political Economy, 2016

As long as there did not exist an identified history of social science subfield, the uneasiness of economists about the definition of their discipline as a social science was of little consequence with regard to its place within the history of science. Things changed, however, in the 1990s, with the move away from disciplinary histories. If the history of the social sciences was more than the mere post hoc juxtaposition of disciplinary histories, the question could be asked as to the proper weight to be accorded to the history of economics within the new subfield of the history of the social sciences as whole. It is the purpose of this article to offer an answer to this question. It shows that though the history of recent economics has ben written primarily by its practitioners, what they write is not the whole history of recent economics. Other social scientists, notably sociologists, intellectual historians and historians of science have increasingly studied the past after the Second World War, offering new perspectives, asking new questions and providing different answers from that of economists qua historians of economics.

2022

This essay has an Introduction and four parts. In Part 1 I refer briefly the relationship between economics and the human sciences drawing on Foucault in The Order of Things (1970). ******** 1. Max Weber, General Economic History (1930); 2. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904); 3. V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899); 4. Talcott Parsons, The Theory of Social Action (1937); 5. J.M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (1932); 6. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944); 7.Marcel Mauss, Essay on the Gift (1925). ******** Each of these individuals, with others of course, launched a branch of knowledge that dissented from professional economics: socio-economic history; institutional economics; neo-Marxism and development economics; economic sociology; macroeconomics; the economic history of world crisis; and economic anthropology. ******** Part 3 summarises, in a manifesto, two decades of the human economy approach. Part 4 has two sections: on organized knowledge, especially the two great principles of our civilization, democracy and science; and the relationship between the humanities and popular culture.

History of Political Economy, 2003

History of Economics Review, 2008

The History Wars of Economics 111 _____________________________________________________________________________ term Research Fields, Courses and Disciplines (RFCD) is replaced with a new simpler term Field of Research (FOR); the term socioeconomic objective (SEO) is retained without change….