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One reasonably useful way to view the history of social science in the U.S. 
(and perhaps elsewhere in the Western world) during the 20th century is to 
see the hegemony of an individual-based neoclassicism in economics, and the 
appeal of this approach in other disciplines (particularly political 
science), as part of a reaction to an overemphasis on "culture" and social 
norms as deterministic that developed in the first half of the century with 
the growth of modern social science. Although the dynamics within Economics 
were somewhat different (and have been well explored by Mirowski and 
others), the appeal of an apparently "scientific" approach that took the 
individual as the basic unit of analysis was grounded in a social context 
of individualism, with individual freedom given great value. What we often 
think of as plain old "neoclassicism" was in actuality a product of 
mid-century developments in which a Marshallian treatment of firms was 
combined with methodological individualism and a quasi-Keynesian 
macroeconomics to produce a "scientific" economics for all times and 
places. The goal of stripping this allegedly scientific approach of the 
soft complexities of history and comparative institutions was not there 
much before World War II. To see this you need only read a few introductory 
Economics texts from the pre-war era. Robin Neill puts it well when he says 
that this turning [to "a positive science"] has flushed the history of the 
West, and the sense of building a particular kind of society, from what is 
now "Economics." 
 
The limits of methodological individualism upon which the broad 
neoclassical synthesis rested, became apparent even as neoclassicism became 
dominant.  Advertisers and business executives never fell for the notion 
that tastes were somehow individually inherent, and beyond examination and 
manipulation, and even in the more rarified reaches of Economics there were 
intrusions of the concept of historically-determined institutional patterns 
such as property rights and expectations.  (This is where Coase came in.) 
What John Adams and Peter Boettke and others have described as the new and 
more pluralistic economics can be seen as the product of the floodgates 
having been opened to history and cultural patterning of human interaction. 
The appeal to methodological individualism as the only foundation for true 
science acted as an effective barrier to history and culture and all of 
that stuff for a long time, but once breached the barrier has given way 
swiftly. 
 
The problem for those of us who know and respect the tradition of OIE 
(Original Institutional Economics), economic as well as political and 
social history, and the multiple traditions of other forms of social 
science to which OIE was related, is that for most economists trained since 
the 1950s or 60s or so, the only known tools of analysis are those of the 
kind of neoclassicism that reigned in U.S. graduate schools from the 1960s 
onward. Further, there has been little training in history or comparative 
studies so that critical evaluation of historical and comparative accounts 
are often poorly grounded. I agree with that arguing about the 
superiority/inferiority of "us" Institutionalists or heterodox sorts versus 
"them" is pointless, but I do not agree that we should not argue about the 
superiority/inferiority of different methods or analysis and argue as well 
about the standards of superiority to be used in evaluating analyses. The 
kind of mathematical elegance and theoretical grounding in individualistic 
decision-making theory that is found in recent AER articles on such topics 
as "the geography of the family" and domestic violence in India need should 
not be granted an uncritical assumption of superiority over sociological 
and historical explanations of family relationships. Yet the training of 
economists is likely to lead precisely to such uncritical validation of 
known techniques. 
 
Although history and institutions are back in vogue, the narrowness of 
training and education of economists threatens our ability to build the 
richer analyses that incorporation of history and institutions requires. 
 
Ann Mayhew 
 
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