erc/metu
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE IN ECONOMICS  IV
September 13-16, 2000, Ankara

Economic Imperialism as Kuhnian Revolution?

Ben Fine (SOAS, London University, UK)

Abstract

It is now forty years since Kuhn laid out his theory of scientific revolution, more than enough time for it to have peaked in popularity and, subsequently, to have become a traversed, if not forgotten, territory in understanding intellectual change. For those economists who participated, even if merely as an audience, in the Kuhnian revolution, it ought in retrospect to stand out as a remarkably rare period of self-examination of a discipline that is notoriously unaware of, and uninterested in, its own history and methodological underpinnings. Whilst primarily concerned with the history of science, Kuhnian notions were readily transposed to the social sciences without economics standing on the sidelines as an exception as for other intellectual fashions such as postmodernism in the more recent period. This is not to suggest that the Kuhnian project was readily assimilated without modification within the dismal science. But it did receive a broad welcome across the discipline. The mainstream, for example, could claim that it practised such a successful and appropriate brand of normal science that it need fear no subsequent revolution, the Keynesian having complemented the marginalist revolution (and the monetarist counter-revolution only on the horizon). On the other hand, the heterodox found much within the Kuhnian framework with which to assault the mainstream as both abnormal and non-scientific by its own, let alone other, standards, with the prospect of itself prospering by way of alternative, Ward (1972) for example.

Such dreams have now been lost rather than fulfilled with the decline of radical political economy and other heterodoxies. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that, not only has the mainstream strengthened its stranglehold on the discipline but there is also currently a revolution going on in or, more exactly, around economics. In brief, it is colonising the social sciences as never before giving rise to what its own practitioners have dubbed economic imperialism. On the basis of the new information-theoretic economics, the new micro-foundations purports to examine both the imperfections of the market as well as the non-market response to them, in the form of institutions, customs, collective action, etc. The latter feature is what enables economics to encroach upon previously uncharted or, at least, hostile territory traditionally occupied and dominated by the other social sciences. Such developments are reflected in the proliferation of "new" fields of economics - the new institutional economics, the new household economics, the economic sociology, the new political economy, the new growth theory, the new labour economics, the new economic geography, the new financial economics, the new development economics, and so on.

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