----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- I cannot repond to this question with respect to English economics of the 19th C, but in America in the late 19th and early 20th C there was intense interest in how the work of psychologists might be applied to economics. The most obvious case is perhaps Thorstein Veblen who was interested in the psychology of William James and others (including Freud). Another person who tried to analyse labor unrest in term of instinct theory was Carlton Parker (writing in around 1915-1917, and Parker had been turned onto this material by William Ogburn, later a well known sociologist at Columbia and Chicago, and a Columbia PhD in Sociology. Wesley Mitchell was also interested in psychological applications to economics, although mainly McDougall and other instinct theorists. F. C. Mills, a student of both Parker's amd Mitchell's, has spoken of his experience between 1915 and 1917 as follows: When I was studying at California and later at Columbia, there was a feeling that exciting new prospects for economics had been revealed by recent work in psychology. In seminar at California, and to a lesser degree at Columbia, the work of McDougall in social psychology, John B. Watson on behaviorism, Patrick on the psychology of relaxation, Trotter on instincts of the herd in peace and war, Crile and others working in psycho-physiological fields, James Harvey Robinson on the making of the mind, and of course Freud (but this, it seems in retrospect, only incidentally), struck us with tremendous impact. That stream of thought in some ways supplemented the one flowing from Peirce, James and Dewey. . . . Veblen again, particularly in raising questions as to why economics was not an evolutionary science, seemed to cut away other pillars. All of this provided a climate thoroughly opposed to the rationalistic tenets of classical economic thought (F. C. Mills to Milton Friedman, 25 June 1951). Malcolm Rutherford ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]