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Dear HESers: 
 
This has nothing directly to do with Exit, Voice, and Loyalty but it does deal with the
"imperialistic phase of economics."
 
Unless I am mistaken, the idea that economics is imperialistic stems from the view in the
1970s or thereabouts that in building models of social and political interaction based on
the self interest assumption, economists could make useful contributions to the
professional academic fields of political science and sociology. Since then, the self
interest assumption has been applied to additional fields, including biology. The fact
that pioneers in this endeavor -- James Buchanan, Douglass North, and Becker -- won Nobel
Prizes in economics suggests that a criticism of economics for such "imperialism" would be
out of place. One must assume that Mohammad did not mean "imperialism" in the pejorative
sense. If this is wrong, then he should be asked to defend his use of this phrase.
 
Incidentally, the self interest assumption was applied in the fields of sociology,
politics, history, and even biology long before the last 50 years. Regarding the latter,
it might be recalled that both Darwin and Wallace, discoverers of natural selection, were
inspired by Thomas Malthus's principle of population, which is an economic model based
partly on the self interest assumption. Early sociologists drew heavily on the the works
of the neoclassical economists. The university academic field of political science only
seems to have developed without much influence from economics, in spite of the practical
writings by, for example, the U.S. founding fathers, who had studied the classical
economics and political economy of Hume and Smith, for example. Nevertheless, in studying
the history of political science, one would be wise to peruse the early issues of the
ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE. Many economics articles
using the self interest assumption were published around the turn of the last century. (I
think these are at JSTOR). But, of course, university political science has changed
substantially in the recent half century. Today, although political science departments
like all tenured university departments contain lots of dead wood, one cannot do credible
political science without referring to the self interest assumption. Only the radical
wholists like some of the "world systems theorists," who take physics and biology as their
prototype for political interaction, would dispute the usefulness of the self interest
assumption.
 
 
Tullock, G., "Economic Imperialism," in James M. Buchanan, Robert D. Tollison, and Gordon
Tullock (eds.), Theory of Public Choice: Political Applications
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), pp. 317-29. 
 
Pat Gunning 
 
 
 
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