History of Political Economy The Social Trajectory of a Finance Professor and the Common Sense of Capital Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana Social scientists, like all professionals, like to scrutinize themselves and their neighbors within their preferred disciplinary frame. Economists, for instance, are particularly fond of the economics of their own discipline and have produced a stream of papers about the rankings and performance of individual authors, departments, and journals. For their part, sociologists and political scientists have been partial to relational representations, thinking about their own feld and subfelds through the prism of dynamic positions and oppositions. Historians and historically inclined scholars, including historians of economics, are often eager to specify how the social sciences’ embeddedness in broader political and economic processes (such as colonial expansion, the Great Depression, the Cold War, or the rise of the welfare state) has shaped their intellectual trajectory. The concern, often, is to try to identify where new ideas come from: cumulative knowl- edge within well organized and paradigmatic disciplines; relational and demographic dynamics within and across felds; and exchanges with or demands from other domains of social life altogether—social movements, business corporations, or government agencies. Correspondence may be addressed to Marion Fourcade, UC Berkeley Sociology Department, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720; e-mail:
[email protected]; and Rakesh Khu- rana, Harvard Business School, Soldiers Field, Boston MA 02163; e-mail:
[email protected]. We are grateful to Bruce Caldwell, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Bruno Théret, and two anony- mous reviewers for their excellent comments on this article. We also thank the participants of the “Contributions of Business Persons to Economics” conference at Duke University (2015), specif- ically Robert Van Horn and Edward Nik-Khah, for their incisive remarks.