----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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 ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]