Economics As Social Science: Economics Imperialism And The Challenge Of Interdisciplinarity

229 Pages·2017·1.342 MB·English

by  Roberto Marchionatti, Mario Cedrini

Economics as Social Science

There is a growing consensus in social sciences that there is a need for
interdisciplinary research on the complexity of human behaviour. At an age of
crisis for both the economy and economic theory, economics is called upon to
fruitfully cooperate with contiguous social disciplines. The term ‘economics
imperialism’ refers to the expansion of economics to territories that lie outside
the traditional domain of the discipline. Its critics argue that in starting with the
assumption of maximizing behaviour, economics excludes the nuances of rival
disciplines and has problems in interpreting real-world phenomena.
This book focuses on a territory that persists to be largely intractable using
the postulates of economics: that of primitive societies. In retracing the origins
of economics imperialism back to the birth of the discipline, this volume argues
that it offers a reductionist interpretation that is poor in interpretative power.
By engaging with the neglected traditions of sociological and anthropologi-
cal studies, the analysis offers suggestions for a more democratic cooperation
between the social sciences.
Economics as Social Science is of great interest to those who study the history
of economic thought, political economy and the history of economic anthropol-
ogy, as well as the history of social sciences and economic methodology.
Roberto Marchionatti is Professor of Economics at the University of Turin,
Italy, where he teaches economics, history of economic theory and economic
anthropology.
Mario Cedrini is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Turin,
Italy, where he teaches macroeconomics, international economics, history of
economic thought and economic anthropology.
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20 Social Capital and Economics
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21 The Economics of Values-Based Organizations
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22 The Economics of Resource-Allocation in Healthcare
Cost-Utility, Social Value and Fairness
Andrea Klonschinski
23 Economics as Social Science
Economics imperialism and the challenge of interdisciplinarity
Roberto Marchionatti and Mario Cedrini
Economics as Social Science
Economics imperialism and the
challenge of interdisciplinarity

Roberto Marchionatti and
Mario Cedrini
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 Roberto Marchionatti and Mario Cedrini
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Marchionatti, Roberto, 1950- author. | Cedrini, Mario, author.
Title: Economics as social science : economics imperialism and the
challenge of interdisciplinary / Roberto Marchionatti and Mario Cedrini.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016023181| ISBN 9781138909298 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315694047 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Economics. | Interdisciplinary research.
Classification: LCC HB71 .M283 2017 | DDC 330—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023181_
ISBN: 978-1-138-90929-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-69404-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Contents

Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: origins, evolution and metamorphoses of
economics imperialism, or the need for an interdisciplinary
research programme on human behaviour 1
PART I
At the roots of economics imperialism: classical and
neoclassical economics and the issue of primitive societies 9
1 The distant origins of economics imperialism:
classical economists and primitive societies 11
1.1 Travellers, philosophers and the savages 11
1.2 Adam Smith: a conjectural primitive economy, or
the model of the “early and rude state of society” 28
1.3 In “the realm of necessity”: Karl Marx’s theory of
pre-capitalist societies 36
2 Economics imperialism revealed: neoclassical
economists and primitive man 53
2.1 Occupy anthropology: Lionel Robbins, Raymond
Firth and the formalist school 53
2.2 Beyond the formalist approach: Clifford Geertz’s and
Richard Posner’s informational approach for
peasant and primitive societies 67
2.3 Beyond the formalist approach: Jack Hirshleifer’s
bioeconomics and the human behavioural ecology
of primitive economies 75
vi Contents
3 Primitive societies in the interpretation of classical and
neoclassical economics: a common model 86
PART II
Economics and the challenge of primitive societies:
anthropological non-formalist approaches 89

4 The primitive system of gift exchange discovered:
Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don 91
4.1 Anthropologists and ‘real’ primitive economies 91
4.2 Mauss’s Essai sur le don 93
4.3 Mauss’s critique of the homo oeconomicus 100
5 The substantivist perspective on the role of the
economy in societies: Karl Polanyi’s and
Marshall Sahlins’s contributions 103
5.1 Karl Polanyi’s substantivism 103
5.2 Marshall Sahlins’s neo-substantivism 110
5.3 The debate on Stone Age Economics in the
1980s and 1990s 120
6 The intelligibility of primitive economic organization:
Sahlins, Lévi-Strauss and Clastres on Mauss’s
political philosophy 127
6.1 Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marshall Sahlins on the
primitive social contract 127
6.2 Pierre Clastres on the relationship between war and
gift exchange in societies “against the state” 129
6.3 Primitive economic organization in the light of
Mauss’s political philosophy 131
PART III
The problem of the ‘other’: economics and unselfish
behaviour 133
7 Economics on altruism, giving and reciprocity 135
7.1 From philanthropy to altruism 135
7.2 Richard Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship and
economists’ embarrassment 138
Contents vii
7.3 Mainstream economics and the gift 145
7.4 The economics of reciprocity 152
A note on the origins of human cooperation: Samuel Bowles
and Herbert Gintis on primitive societies 156
8 A unified framework for behavioural sciences?
On Herbert Gintis’s proposal 158

8.1 How to remedy the “scandalous” pluralism of
social sciences 158
8.2 The socio(bio)logy of homo socialis 162
PART IV
The theoretical and practical relevance of Mauss’s gift
to the development of a non-imperialist economics 169
9 The gift in social sciences 171
9.1 Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of the impossibility
of the (modern) gift 171
9.2 Alvin Gouldner’s sociology: the norm of reciprocity
and the principle of ‘something for nothing’ 173
9.3 On Mauss again: anthropology in the 1980s
and 1990s 176
10 Mauss’s research programme revisited: the Mouvement
anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (MAUSS) 180
10.1 Utilitarianism and anti-utilitarianism 180
10.2 The gift as a new paradigm for social sciences 182
11 A new Maussian perspective in economics 184
11.1 On complexity and economics 184
11.2 Back to the future with Mauss 186
Conclusions: the myth of economics imperialism and the
possibility of a non-imperialist economics 190
Bibliography 197
Index 216
Acknowledgements

The volume embeds the authors’ long-standing concern, and resulting reflections,
on the issue of interdisciplinarity. The perspective here adopted combines the his-
tory of economic ideas with an epistemological and methodological approach to
the limits of economics imperialism. The book builds on some previous works,
and in particular: Gli economisti e i selvaggi (Economists and Savages) by Roberto
Marchionatti (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2008); ‘The Economists and Primitive
Societies. A Critique of Economic Imperialism’, by Roberto Marchionatti, The
Journal of Socio-Economics, 41(5), 2012: 529–40; ‘On the Theoretical and
Practical Relevance of the Concept of Gift to the Development of a Non-Imperialist
Economics’, by Mario Cedrini and Roberto Marchionatti, Review of Radical
Political Economics, forthcoming 2016, and ‘Just Another Niche in the Wall?
How Specialization Is Changing the Face of Mainstream Pluralism’, by Mario
Cedrini and Magda Fontana, a revised version of the Department of Economics
and Statistics ‘Cognetti de Martiis’ Working Paper 2015/10, University of Turin.
This book has benefited greatly from the suggestions of several colleagues and
researchers working in the field of economics, anthropology and history, as well
as from feedback received at a number of conferences and workshops. Special
thanks go to Marshall Sahlins and the participants in the second edition of the
workshop ‘Revisiting the Boundaries of Economics. A Historical Perspective’,
held at Collegio Carlo Alberto, Moncalieri (Turin), on 19 May 2011. We also thank
Matteo Aria, conveners of the conference ‘La produzione sociale dell’altruismo:
il dono del sangue tra dono, stato e mercato’, held at Sapienza University, Rome,
on 27–29 November 2013, and the conference participants. We are grateful to
colleagues of the Department of Economics and Statistics ‘Cognetti de Martiis’
of the University of Turin for their participation in a seminar held on 8 May
2014. We are indebted as well to Michael Perelman and participants in the Annual
Conference of the History of Economics Society, held in Montreal on 20–22 June
2014. Finally, we thank Gianluca Cuniberti and participants in the conference
‘Dono, controdono e corruzione. Ricerche storiche e dialogo internazionale’, held
at Fondazione Luigi Einaudi, Turin, on 3–4 December 2015.
Introduction
Origins, evolution and metamorphoses of
economics imperialism, or the need for an
interdisciplinary research programme
on human behaviour

In a recently debated article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Marion
Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yann Algan (2015) have documented the ongo-
ing insularity of economics within social sciences, mainly in the United States.
Economists believe in their ‘superiority’: they show greater confidence, with
respect to other social scientists, in their own practical mission – fixing the
world’s problems, in Fourcade and colleagues’ terms. And economists believe,
coherently with the ‘economics imperialism’ narrative, in their disciplinary
autonomy. Despite the existence of many schools of thought inside economics,
they easily conceive their field to be unitary and integrated; there is more consen-
sus, in less prosaic words, than in other social sciences. In his qualified defence
of economists’ work as against accusations of reductionist approach to social
phenomena (Rodrik 2015), Harvard economist Dani Rodrik (formerly Albert O.
Hirshman Professor at the School of Social Science at Princeton University) has
recently contested, with some reasons, Fourcade and colleagues’ characterization
of today’s economics as a rigid and homogeneous discipline. He points out in par-
ticular, not without reason, that “economics is a collection of models that admits a
wide variety of possibilities” (Rodrik 2015: 178), and draws attention to the plu-
ralism of research programmes currently pursued in the discipline. Still, it seems
difficult to deny that, as these latter argue, interdisciplinarity – which, following
Choi and Pak’s (2006: 359) definition, “analyzes, synthesizes and harmonizes
links between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole”, while multidis-
ciplinarity “draws on knowledge from different disciplines but stays within the
boundaries of those fields” – is much less valued than in sociology or political
sciences. According to a recent study (Gross and Simmons 2007), economists
are the only social scientists who tend to disagree with the idea that interdiscipli-
nary knowledge is better than knowledge obtained from single disciplines. This
is hardly surprising. The story of economics’ relationships with other disciplines
appears essentially as one of imperialism – be it the imperialism of economics
towards social sciences or the more recent and ambiguous “reverse imperialism”
of other disciplines towards economics.
This introduction to the present volume is devoted to discussing economics
imperialism and its evolution over time, with special concern for its relevance
in the current troubled times for both the economy and economics as discipline.