DOCSLIB.ORG

The Economy and the Foundation of the Modern Body Politic: Malthus and Keynes As Political Philosophers

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Economy and the Foundation of the Modern Body Politic: Malthus and Keynes As Political Philosophers THE ECONOMY AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE MODERN BODY POLITIC: MALTHUS AND KEYNES AS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHERS A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Ute Astrid Tellmann January 2007 © 2007 Ute Astrid Tellmann THE ECONOMY AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE MODERN BODY POLITIC: KEYNES AND MALTHUS AS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHERS Ute Astrid Tellmann, Ph. D. Cornell University 2007 My dissertation explores the making of the modern division between the political and the economic realm. To modern political reason, the economy appears like a self- standing reality, internally related in terms of functions and understood to follow regulating laws of its own. The dissertation counters this account of the relation between the economic and the political realm. It analyzes the epistemological claims to objectivity, on which this division rests and shows how the allegedly neutral depictions of economic necessity remain inextricably linked to political imaginations of order. The main thesis of the work posits that the modern rendering of economic reality in terms of a self-contained and functional realm stems from the desire to establish secure foundations for a viable body politic. The works of Malthus and Keynes are the exemplary cases for this study of the intimate relations between political reason and accounts of economic objectivity. The writings of Malthus crystallize in important respects the emergence of the specific modern objectivity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. With him, the notion of scarcity gained its important role for defining economy. It is shown that the definition of economy in terms of scarcity is tied to Malthus’ attempts to envision a regulatory epistemology for the social body, which ensures a silent and visceral order against the uncertainties of the political world. The economic realm is thus conceived as the foundation of the body politic. The writings of Keynes witness the crisis of this economic foundation at the beginning of the twentieth century. The dissertation explicates Keynes’ critique of the epistemology of scarcity, which underwrites modern accounts of economy. He opens a perspective on economy in terms of temporality, conventions and power, which traverses the closed boundaries of the economy. But this different view on economy is overlaid by Keynes’ political desires to procure new foundations for the body politic: the envisioning of a national economy under the guidance of the economic expert, for which Keynesian economics is known, fulfills this desire. The thinking of economy is thus shown to be inextricably tied to the question of the political. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Ute Astrid Tellmann did her undergraduate studies in Tübingen at the Leibniz Kolleg, at the Free University of Berlin and at the Technical University of Berlin. She studied sociology at graduate level at the University of Toronto and the University of Bielefeld, where she obtained her Diplom in sociology. After working for a short time as a pedagogic counselor for teaching assistants and as a research assistant at the University of Bielefeld, she commenced the Ph.D. program at the Government Department of Cornell University. Her major field is political theory and her minor field is the philosophy of political economy. She holds currently a teaching position at the Institute of Sociology, University of Basel. Her main areas of interest are: social theory, historical epistemology of economy and twentieth-century political thought. iii To my family iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The work for this dissertation has been sustained by the generosity of many institutions and people. The Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, the Mario Einaudi Center and the German Academic Exchange Service each funded my research in parts. I am very thankful for their financial help. I want to express my gratitude to my advisor, Susan Buck-Morss, who has supported the project from its earliest stage. Her encouragement to follow my own theoretical interests strengthened my writing in invaluable and indispensable ways. I benefited immensely from her thoughts and from her experiences as a scholar and writer, which she shared generously with me. For the steady respect and personal support I received from her during my years as a graduate student, I am deeply appreciative. Warmest thanks also go to Geoffrey Waite. His insights into the questions of writing and reading were a source of inspiration and his academic and personal encouragement helped me to navigate the difficult stages of the process. All of my committee members have contributed to this work in essential ways and I want to thank all of them: The perspicacious questions of Jason Frank were motivating and clarifying. The careful comments and useful suggestions aided and supported me in crucial ways. Isaac Kramnick has taught me to learn about the eighteenth century and has made this period alive for me. I am grateful for his critical questions, which prevented me from remaining within too narrow theoretical bounds. For my knowledge about political economy and the support from inside of this discipline, I am indebted in large measures to Jonathan Kirshner. His openness towards perspectives outside of his field, his questions and his advice had decisive importance for this work. The questions, which have motivated this work, have been seeded a long time v ago. They reach back to the classes I took at the University of Toronto with Jack Veugeler and Harriet Friedman, whose strong personal and academic support helped me to frame my interests. I could not have started to pursue these interests and turn them into an academic trajectory, were it not for the long-standing encouragement and support from Urs Staeheli. I am very thankful for the assistance I received. I would like to thank especially K-Sue Park, Sonam Singh, Dorian Stuber, Marianne Tettlebaum and Ryan Plumley for the time and care they took to correct my work, even on such short notice. Special thanks also go to Joseph Vogl, who was so kind to comment on the first ideas and to Roland Hain at the Studienstiftung, whose personal interest in my topic has made this foundation more than a financial source of support. Without the work of Andrea Mennicken and Andreas Timminger, who helped to format the dissertation at last minute, the project could not have been completed in time. Tina Slater often went out of her way to help me with the bureaucratic matters and made my life much easier. My new colleagues at the University of Basel were extremely generous and shouldered additional work in order to give me time to write. My thanks go to all of them. During this time of writing and thinking, which is as much personal as academic, exceptional friendships have nourished me. From my friends in Bielefeld and Husum and from the Berliner Wahlverwandschaften, I have received wonderful support, which was sent from a little distance to the academic world. Without those, who stood closest to me in this world and who have accompanied me in intellectual friendship, this work could not have been sustained. I want to thank Kathrin Thiele and Birgit Kaiser, Andrea Mennicken, Ayse Banu Bargu, Leila Ibrahim, Irene Mittelberg, Heidi Voskuhl, Stephanie Hofman, Kelly Dietz, Sandrine Poisson, Sonam Singh, Jonah Corne, Torben Lohmüller, Sven Opitz and John Kim. The Villa Willow and its friends – as Irene and Leila know – was a beautiful home during this time. vi My deepest thanks go to my parents and my sister, who have trusted me and without whose steady support I could not have embarked on any of my projects. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.........................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................v INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 The Shoreless Sea of Political Reason and the Quest for Foundation ...26 CHAPTER 2 Scarcity and the Making of the Order of Bodies....................................56 CHAPTER 3 The Civilized Body Politic, Economic Man and Necessity...................79 CHAPTER 4 The Double Constitution in Crisis and the Return of the Political.......104 CHAPTER 5 Temporality and the Conventions of Economy....................................133 CHAPTER 6 Plato’s Heirs .........................................................................................161 CONCLUSION Economy and the Question of the Political .....................................193 REFERENCES ...........................................................................................................202 ARCHIVAL SOURCES ............................................................................................213 viii INTRODUCTION In December 1991 the world famous economist Jeffrey Sachs traveled to Russia, invited by president Yeltsin to give his advice about how to set the failing remnants of the inherited Soviet economy onto a new track. The “dead-end” of socialist economic wisdom, the political change and the rampant inflation was to be healed by new recipes of the “clinical economist,” to use the term Jeffrey Sachs prefers for himself. He had collected credentials as an advisor to Bolivia, Poland and Chile earlier, being very much in demand by politicians the world over. Having applied his wisdoms to other economies before, equipped
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 1. the Damnation of Economics
    Notes 1. The Damnation of Economics 1. One example of vice-regal patronage of anti-economics is Canada’s ‘Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction’. In 1995 this honour was bestowed upon John Raulston Saul’s anti-economic polemic The Unconscious Civilization (published in 1996). A taste of Saul’s wisdom: ‘Over the last quarter-century economics has raised itself to the level of a scientific profession and more or less foisted a Nobel Prize in its own honour onto the Nobel committee thanks to annual financing from a bank. Yet over the same 25 years, economics has been spectacularly unsuc- cessful in its attempts to apply its models and theories to the reality of our civili- sation’ (Saul 1996, p. 4). See Pusey (1991) and Cox (1995) for examples of patronage of anti-economics by Research Councils and Broadcasting Corporations. 2. Another example of economists’ ‘stillness’: the economists of 1860 did not join the numerous editorial rebukes of Ruskin’s anti-economics tracts (Anthony, 1983). 3. The anti-economist is not to be contrasted with the economist. An economist (that is, a person with a specialist knowledge of economics) may be an anti- economist. The true obverse of anti-economist is ‘philo-economist’: someone who holds that economics is a boon. 4. One may think of economics as a disease (as the anti-economist does), or one may think of economics as diseased. Mark Blaug: ‘Modern economics is “sick” . To para- phrase the title of a popular British musical: “No Reality, Please. We’re Economists”’ (Blaug 1998, p.
    [Show full text]
  • Economic Theory, Politics and the State in the Neoliberal Epoch
    Economic Theory, Politics and the State in the Neoliberal Epoch Stahl, Rune Møller Document Version Submitted manuscript Publication date: 2018 Citation for published version (APA): Stahl, R. M. (2018). Economic Theory, Politics and the State in the Neoliberal Epoch. Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. Ph.d.-serien Link to publication in CBS Research Portal General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us ([email protected]) providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 30. Sep. 2021 ECONOMIC THEORY, POLITICS AND THE STATE IN THE NEOLIBERAL EPOCH Rune Møller Stahl Department of Political Science Faculty of Social Sciences University of Copenhagen This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2018 CONTENT Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................................................... 3 Thesis Framework ............................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • David Ricardo. Life, Original Ideas and the Greek Translation of His Works
    DAVID RICARDO: LIFE, ORIGINAL IDEAS AND THE GREEK TRANSLATIONS OF HIS WORKS Manolis Spathis [email protected] David Ricardo was born in 1772 in London. His family was rich and his father was a banker. David Ricardo’s relations with his family were deeply hurt when he was baptized Christian while his family were Jewish. Before his 25th year of age, Ricardo already had the reputation of a millionaire and a great banker. After he had accumulate a satisfying fortune he was not interested in stock market that much. In his mid 20s he had a complete shift in his lifestyle, he dropped the stock market, bought a piece of land and got occupied educating himself. He studied math and physics, he even built a laboratory and collected stones. A couple later he had already been impressed and inspired by Adam Smith’s book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. This was a period of great turbulence and instability for the British economy due to the long-lasting war with France. This fact boosted the discussion over economics and caused a great deal of tensions between the people affected by the rapid devaluation of the banknotes and the skyrocketing of grain prices. In 1809, ten years after Ricardo’s initial decision to engage with economics, he published a brochure under the title On the High Price of Bullion, introducing a quantitative theory of money and suggesting the withdrawal of a certain amount of money in order to restore its value compared to gold.
    [Show full text]
  • Revisiting a Definition Toward the Meaning of the New Political Economy
    International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change. www.ijicc.net Volume 10, Issue 10, 2020 The Meaning of Political Economy: Revisiting a Definition toward the Meaning of the New Political Economy Mohd Syakir Mohd Rosdia*, Richard Jacksonb, aCenter for Islamic Development Management Studies, 11800 Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia, bNational Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand, Email: a*[email protected]/[email protected] The aim of this article is to examine the meaning of political economy. Although it is clearly defined, scholars throughout history have been challenged to distinguish the science of political economy and the sciences of economics and politics as separate disciplines. There are two problems. Firstly, we need to recognize accurately the scholars in political economy. Secondly, there has been a clash of ideas as many scholars built a framework of understanding in political economy. Many scholars mixed their ideas to build a specific framework of meaning of political economy. Some scholars approached political economy from an economic perspective, others from a political perspective. Based on a literature review and textual analysis, this paper will re-evaluate the meaning of political economy that recognises the need to focus on both the definition and the history of the field. It can be difficult to recognize the contribution of economic scholars such as Smith and Ricardo or political scholars such as Marx in the field of political economy. However, it has been established that they contributed to an ideology that developed the understanding of classical political economy. Adjusting for a political scholars’ perspective and economical scholars’ perspective, the pathway from the classical political economy into the new political economy is still to infer the meaning of political economy.
    [Show full text]
  • English Marginalism
    Department of Economics Working Paper Series English Marginalism John Creedy September 2010 Research Paper Number 1109 ISSN: 0819‐2642 ISBN: 978 0 7340 4462 4 Department of Economics The University of Melbourne Parkville VIC 3010 www.economics.unimelb.edu.au English Marginalism∗ John Creedy The University of Melbourne ∗This article is forthcoming in G. Faccarello and H.D. Kurz (eds.) Handbook of the History of Economic Thought:Volume2Schools of Thought in Economics. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. I am grateful to Denis O’Brien for comments on an earlier version. 1 The term ‘English marginalism’ generally refers to the work and outlook of a small group of economists working in England in roughly the last quarter of the 19th century. These may be thought of as pioneer neoclassical economists and include, as major figures, Jevons, Marshall, Edgeworth and Wicksteed.1 Edgeworth was Anglo- Irish, and Jevons developed his earliest ideas in Australia, but it is obviously appro- priate to group them under English marginalism. Distinctions along such national lines are of course not necessarily solid, particularly as, following the lead set by Jevons, this period can be regarded as the ‘high period’ in the international exchange of ideas. And as Hutchison (1955, p. 9) stated, ‘Edgeworth, Wicksteed, Auspitz and Lieben, Wieser, Bohm-Bawerk, Wicksell, Walras, Pareto, Barone and Fisher all drew on a broad, internationally known literature’. Important and original works were, ‘constructed essentially on the basis of a wide, eclectic, cosmopolitan reading of their contemporaries and immediate predecessors’ (Hutchison, 1955, p. 9).2 Nevertheless, it is possible to discern differences, in views and influences, between English and continental writers during this period.
    [Show full text]
  • Finance and Class in the Marginalist Revolution Yair Kaldor*
    Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ser/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/soceco/mwy043/5238113 by Ben Gurion University of the Negev-Medical Library user on 28 July 2019 Socio-Economic Review, 2018, Vol. 0, No. 0, 1–19 doi: 10.1093/soceco/mwy043 Article Article The cultural foundations of economic categories: finance and class in the marginalist revolution Yair Kaldor* Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA *Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract Economic categories are part of the everyday concepts people use to apprehend social reality. While scholars recognize their importance for social and economic processes, it is not clear how these categories develop when reality itself changes. I address this issue with a framework that incorporates a cultural emphasis on meaning-making with a macro-structural analysis of the conditions in which they take place. I apply this framework to the marginalist revolution of the late 19th century, which marks the birth of neoclassical economics and focus on the new understanding of ‘value’ that emerged during this period. I trace it to the rise of finance and the problem of price fluctuations, and show how its class standpoint helps explain the different outcomes of the marginalist revolution in England, Austria and France. The analysis provides insights into the power of economic ideas and the cultural dimension of structural changes. Key words: economic categories, culture, finance, value, neoclassical economics, economic sociology JEL classification: B History of Economic Thought, N2 History of Financial Markets and Institutions, N1 Macroeconomic and Monetary History 1. Introduction The basic categories of economics appear as self-evident and are hardly in need of explana- tion.
    [Show full text]
  • THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography, 1933 I
    Chapter 12 THOMAS ROBERT MALTHUS John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography, 1933 I. THE FIRST OF THE CAMBRIDGE ECONOMISTS1 Bacchus—when an Englishman is called Bacchus—derives from Bakehouse. Similarly the original form of the rare and curious name of Malthus was Malthouse. The pronunciation of English proper names has been more constant one century with another [Editorial Note. The earliest surviving form of this essay is the paper Keynes gave in May 1914 to The Political Philosophy and Science Club at New College, Oxford, entitled 'Is the problem of population a pressing and important one now?' In 1922 Keynes expanded the material on Malthus and read the paper on various occasions to his Monday evening Political Economy Club in Cambridge, and, on 2 April 1924, to the London Political Economy Club. We print here the text prepared in 1933 for Essays in Biography, with the minor amendments of the first reprint on p. 82, and in brackets at the top of p. 94. The manuscript from which the Essays in Biography version was printed survives among the Keynes Papers. Keynes prepared it from a copy of the 1922 text, making insertions or excisions from it. In the early pages these principally represent additional information that Keynes had acquired regarding the Malthus family, Daniel Malthus's relations with Rousseau and Robert Malthus's education. The central part of the essay, from p. 80 to p. 86, contains little change from the 1922 version. The section from p. 87 ('Meanwhile Malthus had continued...') to p. 91 ('Economics is a very dangerous science.') is wholly new.
    [Show full text]
  • 8. David Ricardo and Classical Economics Robert L
    Section XIV: The ndusI trial Revolution, Classical Contemporary Civilization (Ideas and Institutions Economics, and Economic Liberalism of Western Man) 1958 8. David Ricardo and Classical Economics Robert L. Bloom Gettysburg College Basil L. Crapster Gettysburg College Harold L. Dunkelberger Gettysburg College See next page for additional authors Follow this and additional works at: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/contemporary_sec14 Part of the Economic History Commons, Economic Theory Commons, and the Growth and Development Commons Share feedback about the accessibility of this item. Bloom, Robert L. et al. "8. David Ricardo and Classical Economics. Pt XIV: The ndusI trial Revolution, Classical Economics, and Economic Liberalism." Ideas and Institutions of Western Man (Gettysburg College, 1958), 37-49. This is the publisher's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution. Cupola permanent link: https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/ contemporary_sec14/8 This open access book chapter is brought to you by The uC pola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of The uC pola. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 8. David Ricardo and Classical Economics Abstract It is David Ricardo, (1772-1823) rather than Malthus who has long been regarded as the more outstanding of the classical economists after Adam Smith. His father was a Jewish immigrant to England who became a prosperous merchant and broker. Ricardo entered his father's business, but after marrying a Quakeress and embracing her faith was forced onto his own resources.
    [Show full text]
  • Ideological Profiles of the Economics Laureates · Econ Journal Watch
    Discuss this article at Journaltalk: http://journaltalk.net/articles/5811 ECON JOURNAL WATCH 10(3) September 2013: 255-682 Ideological Profiles of the Economics Laureates LINK TO ABSTRACT This document contains ideological profiles of the 71 Nobel laureates in economics, 1969–2012. It is the chief part of the project called “Ideological Migration of the Economics Laureates,” presented in the September 2013 issue of Econ Journal Watch. A formal table of contents for this document begins on the next page. The document can also be navigated by clicking on a laureate’s name in the table below to jump to his or her profile (and at the bottom of every page there is a link back to this navigation table). Navigation Table Akerlof Allais Arrow Aumann Becker Buchanan Coase Debreu Diamond Engle Fogel Friedman Frisch Granger Haavelmo Harsanyi Hayek Heckman Hicks Hurwicz Kahneman Kantorovich Klein Koopmans Krugman Kuznets Kydland Leontief Lewis Lucas Markowitz Maskin McFadden Meade Merton Miller Mirrlees Modigliani Mortensen Mundell Myerson Myrdal Nash North Ohlin Ostrom Phelps Pissarides Prescott Roth Samuelson Sargent Schelling Scholes Schultz Selten Sen Shapley Sharpe Simon Sims Smith Solow Spence Stigler Stiglitz Stone Tinbergen Tobin Vickrey Williamson jump to navigation table 255 VOLUME 10, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2013 ECON JOURNAL WATCH George A. Akerlof by Daniel B. Klein, Ryan Daza, and Hannah Mead 258-264 Maurice Allais by Daniel B. Klein, Ryan Daza, and Hannah Mead 264-267 Kenneth J. Arrow by Daniel B. Klein 268-281 Robert J. Aumann by Daniel B. Klein, Ryan Daza, and Hannah Mead 281-284 Gary S. Becker by Daniel B.
    [Show full text]
  • Constructing a Myth That Ricardo Was the Father of the Ricardian Model of International Trade: a Reconsideration of Torrens C
    Constructing a Myth that Ricardo Was the Father of the Ricardian Model of International Trade: A Reconsideration of Torrens’ Principles of Comparative Advantage and Gain-from-trade Taro Hisamatsu September 2016 Discussion Paper No.1630 GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS KOBE UNIVERSITY ROKKO, KOBE, JAPAN Torrens’ Principles of Comparative Advantage and Gain-from-trade 1 Constructing a Myth that Ricardo Was the was resolutely opposed by Jacob Hollander (1910) Father of the Ricardian Model of who held the view that it was Ricardo’s discovery. A International Trade: controversy ensued in The Economic Journal, one of A Reconsideration of Torrens’ Principles of the most authoritative publications in the field of Comparative Advantage and economics (Seligman and Hollander 1911). Gain-from-trade† Seligman’s claim gained the support of later distinguished economists, such Gottfried Haberler Taro Hisamatsu (1933), Jacob Viner (1937), Joseph Schumpeter (1954), Lionel Robbins (1958), John Chipman (1965), Paul Samuelson (1969), Douglas Irwin (1996), Marry Abstract Kemp, and Masayuki Okawa (2006), not to mention Historians of economic thought have often pointed out Roy Ruffin (2002; 2005), who insisted on “debunking that Ricardo’s famous England-Portugal model differs a myth” of Torrens’ 1815 anticipation and declared from the “Ricardian model” presented in modern Ricardo’s 1816 discovery. Ruffin was overwhelmingly international economics textbooks. This paper argues in favor of the view that what Torrens described in that the erroneous belief that David Ricardo was the 1815 was the concept of absolute advantage.2 father of the Ricardian model might have arisen from “The myth,” Ruffin (2005, 711) wrote, “was started Robert Torrens’ own explanations of comparative by Torrens himself in 1826 [in the third edition of advantage and his repeated claims.
    [Show full text]
  • Malthus and Ricardo
    Malthus–Ricardo Debate The debate between Malthus and Ricardo is documented by a bulky correspondence that lasted over 12 years, and luckily enough is preserved to a remarkable extent, as well as by direct or indirect echoes in published works by both. Keynes believed it to be ‘the most famous literary correspondence in the whole development of Political Economy’ ([1933] 1972: 90) and indeed he was the first to make it the subject of some discussion, followed by a few others (Pancoast, 1943), even if systematic discussion may be said to have begun in the 1970s (Porta, 1978; Dorfman, 1989; Cremaschi and Dascal, 1996, 1998a, 1998b; Dascal and Cremaschi, 1999). The controversy’s development Malthus and Ricardo first met in June 1811, at a time when Malthus already was the famous author of the Essay on Population, while Ricardo had just started publishing on topics of monetary policy in the Morning Chronicle. All we know is that they met in London, where Malthus used to come regularly from Haileybury College. After 1814, when Ricardo began to spend half of the year on his estate at Gatcombe Park, Malthus visited there just three times, but Ricardo apparently spent a number of weekends with the Malthuses at Haileybury, and also, after the Political Economy Club was founded, they started meeting regularly at its monthly dinners (Henderson, 1997: 286–336). A correspondence between them began that lasted until Ricardo’s death. In the first two letters both expressed the wish to settle ‘by an amicable discussion in private’ (Malthus to Ricardo, 18 June 1811, Works, VI: 21) those that appeared to be ‘the very few objections’ that prevented them ‘from being precisely of the same opinion’ (Ricardo to Malthus, 18 June 1811, ibid.: 23–4).
    [Show full text]
  • Professional Economists and Policymaking in the United States, 1880-1929
    ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: IRRELEVANT GENIUS: PROFESSIONAL ECONOMISTS AND POLICYMAKING IN THE UNITED STATES, 1880-1929 Jonathan S. Franklin, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Dissertation Directed By: Professor David B. Sicilia, Department of History The rapid establishment and expansion of economics departments in colleges across the United State in the late nineteenth century indicates a significant shift in the way Americans understood economic science and its importance to federal economic policy. This dissertation addresses that phenomenon by explaining how American economists professionalized; and how that process influenced economic policymaking in the U.S. from the formation of the American Economic Association in 1885 to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Chapters alternate between analyzing the dilemmas economists faced while crafting a distinct academic discipline and investing early professional economists’ role in the federal economic policymaking process. Three emerging themes help explain the consistent failure of early U.S. economists to translate modern economic theory to economic policy in a timely fashion. First, public skepticism and the persistence of folk economics proved to be a powerful deterrent to professionally-trained economists’ authority in debates over policy matters. The combination of democratic idealism, populist politics, and skepticism regarding the motivations of professionally-trained economists undercut much of the social prestige professional economists garnered as educated elites. Second, disagreement among professional economists, often brought on by young economists’ efforts to overturn a century’s worth of received wisdom in classical economic theory, fostered considerable dissent within the field. Dissent, in turn, undermined the authority of professional economists and often led to doubt regarding economists’ abilities among the public and policy compromises that failed to solve economic problems.
    [Show full text]