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Abstract
The basic thesis of this paper is that Ben Fine and Grahame Thompson's 1999 exchange on economics imperialism illustrates two positions that talk across each other. Fine's approach to understanding the field of mainstream economics combines methodological analysis of theoretical innovation and a broad critical sociology. Thompson's response to Fine combines methodological analysis of practical and theoretical problems that currently inhibit the mainstream with a broad pluralist/pragmatist philosophical position. Analysing each position provides a useful way to develop the issues at stake in the debate – specifically, what are the potentials and ramifications of mainstream economics? We argue that mainstream economics does have real tendencies conducive to expansion. Its discursive constitution is dualistic (defining its limits but with an insignificant outside) and knows no genuine boundary. It has also been engaged in a process of eliminating alternatives within economics that have traditionally emphasized the very concepts that seemingly form the basis of current innovation. This implies that the basis of innovation cannot simply be one of a realization of explanatory failure resulting in a positive transformation of the field that also happens to be conducive to imperialism in an even more effective way than prior imperialist tendencies have afforded. At the same time, whether mainstream economics and its imperial tendencies are negative remains an open yet determinable issue, one we illustrate through an analysis of information-theoretic economics.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Grahame Thompson and Ben Fine for comments on and encouragement with an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also to an anonymous reviewer for additional references.
Notes
Jamie Morgan, Open University in the NW, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
‘Given the unrealized expectations for economics imperialism, what has been the outcome for its partially thwarted incursions?’
Collander et al. argue that the term 'orthodoxy’ carries negative connotations of closed mindedeness, of a static and unitary field whereas 'mainstream indicates’ a range and diversity with a certain loose commonality – in this case around technical modelling.
As Fine notes, ‘The prospects for political economy are not positive within economics as a discipline. They look far more encouraging as social theory addresses and embraces the need for an economic content. Political economy has the potential to compete successfully with mainstream economics across the social sciences in view of its more acceptable methods and theory to them. Nonetheless, social theory remains marked by the bifurcation between the social and the economic. Knowledge and use of political economy is fragmented and mixed as well as arbitrary and ill-informed. There is a need for a renewal of core material from political economy’ (Fine Citation2002: 198–9).
The emergence of post-autistic economics, the growth of organizations such as ATTAC and the current Association of Heterodox Economics conference theme of opening up economics on the basis of addressing urgent global economic problems are encouraging signs of progress here.