by From Lars Syll Economic history was one of the first fields to succumb at least partially to so-called economics imperialism, the phenomenon through which the methods and models of economic theory have taken over other social scientific subject fields. The economic historian’s craft, which probably always tended to err in any case towards retrospective reassurance that things were never as bad as they appeared at the time, was thus at least to some extent overwritten by the economic theorist’s often unflinching faith in the universal applicability of their explanatory models … In its orthodox form at least, economic theory reduces all behaviour to that which is consistent with the solution to a partial differential equation. Such equations will no longer typically be visible in the
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from Lars Syll
Economic history was one of the first fields to succumb at least partially to so-called economics imperialism, the phenomenon through which the methods and models of economic theory have taken over other social scientific subject fields. The economic historian’s craft, which probably always tended to err in any case towards retrospective reassurance that things were never as bad as they appeared at the time, was thus at least to some extent overwritten by the economic theorist’s often unflinching faith in the universal applicability of their explanatory models …
In its orthodox form at least, economic theory reduces all behaviour to that which is consistent with the solution to a partial differential equation. Such equations will no longer typically be visible in the resulting model, because to say that they are hardly at the cutting-edge of mathematical sophistication is obviously a rather big understatement. But the presence of economic agents who act slavishly in this way is likely to be a necessary feature of those models. They are always either maximising or minimising something, akin to the position of turning points of mathematical functions taking the form y = f(x). No challenge is permitted to this conception of agency, because it is simply assumed that nature has ordained the economic agent to act in this way. If they are not either maximising or minimising something, then they cannot be considered to have acted economically at all.
Economic history written through the perspective of this style of orthodox economic theory consequently has all of its behavioural uncertainty removed at the point of origin. Historical uncertainty may still be admissible, but what of the scope for fleshing out the feelings of alienation that so often follow from being caught in a moment of intense historical uncertainty? Presumably this has to be severely curtailed if every economic agent at every moment of time is blessed with pure certainty of behaviour.