Why History of Economics?^*

Abstract

This essay addresses the question, why, if at all, the history of economic thought should have relevance for students of economics, as economists. The critical point turns on the existence of qualitative differences between the social sciences and (most of) the natural sciences – differences which no amount of intellectual progress could ever eliminate. Thereby, it is argued that the social sciences simultaneously share partly in the character of the natural sciences and partly in the character of the humanities. Hence, most of the argument is also applicable to the larger question of the relevance of the history of social thought as a whole, for students across all the social sciences.

Keywords:

• Philosophy of social science
• descriptive versus normative economics
• classical versus marginalist economics

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tony Aspromourgos is the author of The Science of Wealth: Adam Smith and the Framing of Political Economy (Routledge, 2009), as well as numerous articles in all the major journals devoted to the history of economic thought, and a former editor of the History of Economics Review.

Notes

* This is a revised version of an address given at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru on 28 February 2017 and at the University of Hyderabad on 3 March 2017.

1 By ‘students of economics’ I mean to include practising economists – both academic economists and real-world practitioners.

2 This practice, incidentally, also means that when the economists who are graduated from these textbook-governed programmes cite primary sources or classic texts, they are almost always citing works they have never ever read.

3 If you are wondering why 11 rather than 10, it is because I could not bring myself to reduce the list to 10! I suppose if I had, I would have had to leave out Wicksell.

4 In relation to this, see also Geoffrey Brennan’s (2014) commentary, which is followed by a response from me (and two others) and a reply by Brennan.

5 By ‘marginalist economics’ I refer to the dominant, mainstream approach in academic economics today (commonly called ‘neo-classical’ economics), which arose in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Marginalism took its most clear theoretical form in the shape of general equilibrium theory, in which the three fundamental data of the theory are: technology, constituting the methods available for producing commodities with inputs of produced commodities and other resources (‘factors of production’); the preferences of the individuals in the economy (individuals’ preferences being assumed autonomous with respect to those of others, and autonomous with respect to the processes and endogenous variables of the theory); and the quantities of resources available for use and their distribution among the individuals (‘endowments’). Under competitive conditions, these data might then generate well-defined supply and demand functions for commodities and factors of production – on the further supposition that individuals choose efficient means for the maximum satisfaction of their preferences. This, it was at least hoped, would enable determination of a meaningful set of ‘equilibrium’ prices (including factor prices), outputs and quantities of factors employed – by reference to conditions of generalized market-clearing (balance or equilibrium between aggregate supplies and demands, for all commodities and factors). The term ‘marginalism’ reflects the optimization conditions associated with the equilibria of the theory, embodied in marginal equalities or inequalities (Aspromourgos 2009b, 273, n. 9).

6 I must admit – now that I’m a ‘little’ older – to finding Kuhn’s suggestion not quite so amusing as I once did! He actually quotes Charles Darwin and Max Planck expressing sentiments along these lines (Kuhn 1962, 151), the latter commenting: ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die’ (Planck 1949, 33–34). The same idea is often rendered as ‘science progresses, one funeral at a time’ (of uncertain origin). I am indebted to Julian Wells for these references.

7 I say ‘most’ of natural science because the issues I raise here as differentiating social science from natural science affect some parts of natural science as well. Consider the case of psychiatry and its rather unfortunate history.

8 I don’t wish to systematically address here the issue of why, as noted in my introductory comments, the dominant view in contemporary academic economics is so indifferent or averse to HET; but a widespread naïve notion of intellectual progress in economic science is probably the key reason. Or perhaps not naïve: an aspiration to imagine or pretend that economics is of a kind with natural science provides strong motivation to deny the relevance of HET to contemporary economics. See the Clive James quotation, and my associated commentary, in section 5 below. On HET and the limits to unqualified progress in economic science, see also Roncaglia (1996: 297–300) and Kurz (2006: 466–75). Chapter 1 of Roncaglia (2005) is a somewhat expanded version of the 1996 article.

9 This is also the fundamental reason why the traditional natural-science-based ‘history and philosophy of science’ conception of the relationship between science and its history, including its intellectual history, is inadequate for the social sciences, however satisfactory it may be for the natural sciences.

10 It is instructive even though the authors’ use in their title of the phrase, ‘academic Left’, to describe their target is ill-conceived. They themselves admit to discomfort with that phrase:

When we use the phrase academic left we do not refer merely to academics with left-wing political views. There are plenty of such people with whom we have no quarrel. There are countless academics who do excellent and penetrating work … from a left-wing viewpoint. There are countless left-wing scientists – although we are stodgy enough to insist that there is no such thing as left-wing science. (Gross and Levitt 1998, 9)

11 In preparing my 2008 symposium contribution, and hence searching for a copy of Snow’s lecture in my university library system, I was at first a little surprised to discover that the first edition was only available in the library of the Faculty of Architecture. But upon reflection, that is precisely a discipline in which the two species of knowledge most definitely connect (if not collide!).

12 On the notion of economics as a separable but not autonomous science, see Aspromourgos (2011), which draws on some parts of Aspromourgos (2009b).

13 I include in this judgement the relatively recent developments in behavioural and experimental economics. Whatever their merits as departures from the traditional a priori and axiomatic psychology of conventional marginalist economics, they are too individualistically and ‘micro’ oriented to offer anything along these lines.

14 Garegnani (1987) is a somewhat more expansive version of his 1984 article.