A club of socializers: The future of the economic discipline
Juliane Riese, University of Bremen
This paper argues that it is time for economists to develop a concrete idea of “the social”.
The classical economists were interested in ethical and social questions and decidedly interdisciplinary in their work. The German Historical School had a concept of the “social organism” and the “social will”, which could not be explained in a reductionist manner by referring to the behaviour of individual agents. American Institutionalism took a more pragmatic perspective but also focussed on institutions as social phenomena. However, the triumph of neoclassical economics meant that methodological individualism and homo economicus won for the time being. “The social” – sometimes also called culture, or system, in any case something rather more than the sum of its parts – was left to other disciplines, so economists could always devalue tentative attempts to bring it back as “merely sociology”. Remarkably, even the branch of evolutionary economics, which explicitly criticizes mainstream economics for its reductionism, its atomist ontology, its mechanistic world-view and so forth, has not quite developed a convincing idea of what “the social” really is. Could economists integrate into their theorizing the idea that individual agents form something when brought together, or that something emerges when they are brought together, just as humans may be said to be more than the sum of their bodies’ cells or substances?
The paper traces some impulses of why this might be a good idea, including suggestions by feminists and the so-called post-autistic movement in economics, and explores the consequences of such a move. Apart from relieving economics from the fetters of positivism, an idea of “the social” might enable the discipline, in cooperation with others, to build a more comprehensive and general theory of the evolution of economic processes. This theory could incorporate aspects like self-referentiality (which is not compatible with the demands on preference orderings in “modern” economics) and integrate micro- and macro-level. It might enable economics to move from a perfectionist world-view in which all deviations from “equilibrium” are “disturbances” to a perspective which takes the uniqueness of economic systems and the path-dependency of their development into account.
Contemporary economics is the science of scarce means and infinite needs. Homo economicus and the removal of “women’s work” from the field of economic interest can be interpreted as a flight from dependence and fear through projection of individual autonomy and independence on a model. The economics of the future is the science of “how we arrange provision of our sustenance” (Julie A. Nelson), “the science of care” (Adelheid Biesecker) (which allows for better integration with management and organization theory). Our embeddedness in and dependence on social systems should therefore not merely be expressed in the form of an assumption of “connectedness of individuals”. Our social systems and our connections with them should take concrete theoretical shapes.