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I am a great fan of Weintraub & Mirowski's 1994 essay "The 
Pure and the Applied:  Bourbakism Comes to Mathematical Economics" 
_Science in Context_, 7 (2):  245-272.  Anyone who has yet to 
read this is in for a real eye-opener -- and a significant contribution 
to our understanding of the roots of the contemporary explanatory 
failure of the formalist project in economics.  But I must object to 
Roy's suggestion that this is the beginning and the end of our 
understanding of the notion of 'formalism' in mathematics or economics. 
I might point folks to Michael Friedman's excellent little essay 
"Philosophy and the Exact Sciences" in _Inference, Explanation, and 
Other Frustrations_ edited by John Earman, Los Angeles:  U. of California 
Press, 1992, for a richer account of the history of formalism in 
mathematics and science.  As Friedman tells the story, the modern vision 
of formalism begins with the modern logic of Frege, and its replacement 
of the old picture of logic inherited from Aristotle, along with Frege's 
dissatisfaction with the lack of rigor in 19th century mathematics. 
Frege's project was itself part of the replacement of the previous effort 
at providing a 'rigorous' foundation for mathematics and science in the 
Kant/Newton picture of math and physics.  The Frege program, when combined 
with the new picture of science inherited from Comte and Mach, was viewed 
as a more rigorous replacement of the Kantian system, and its various 
Neo-Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist, historicist, hermeneutical, and phenomen- 
ological varieties.  This replacement was percieved as necessary in 
light of the refutation of the Kantian system with the development of 
Non-Euclidian geometry and the theory of Relativity -- counter-examples 
to Kant's picture of synthetic apriori knowledge.  Frege's program, 
along with the Mach program, grew as an explicitly formalist program, and 
this formalist program had tremedous influence in all branches of the 
special sciences and humanities.  Aspects of this formalist revolution 
can be tracked into economics directly through the influence of folks like 
Carnap, Schlick, Popper, and others on the work of Hutchison, Friedman, 
Wald, Hayek, and even Samuelson and Schumpeter, among others. 
 
The full context of this formalist revolution in logic, mathematics, 
and the social sciences must be understood, however, in the context of 
the German debates in the Neo-Kantian tradition -- a point made in part by 
Friedman, and also by Nancy Cartwright, et al in their _Otto Neurath_ 
Cambridge:  Cambridge U. Press, 1996.  This history would include an account 
of the key roles of Menger, Windelband, the various schools of Neo- 
Kantianism, in the picture of knowledge debated in Germany during this 
time, as well, in the later period in economics, of the key role of the 
influence of Mises on folks like Robbins, Hayek, and Hutchison, both 
the way that the Mises picture of value changed the topic of economics 
for folks like Robbins and the role of the value construction, and how 
folks like Hayek, Hutchison, and Friedman, among others, reacted against 
Mises attempt to hand on to the dated picture of synthetic apriori 
knowledge inherited from Kant and the neo-Kantians. 
 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
UC-Riverside 
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http://members.gnn.com/logosapien/ransom.htm 
 
 
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