Poetry, Faith & Chivalry: Alfred Marshall's Response to Socialism (original) (raw)
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ALFRED MARSHALL'S PUZZLES. BETWEEN ECONOMICS AS A POSITIVE SCIENCE AND ECONOMIC CHIVALRY
The relationship between the development of economics and economic performance is not reducible to any set of simple rules. Among the historians of economic thought there is even a handful of those who perceive the progress in economics mostly as an outcome of the attempts to solve the problems, inconsistencies and paradoxes within economic theory itself. Seen from this perspective, economic reality has minor (or no) importance. On the other hand, the endeavours to modify a mainstream approach are significantly greater in times of economic downturns. Seeing that economics is in such a state of ‘intellectual ferment’ nowadays, it is worth reconsidering the connection between economics and the economy. Thus the main aim of the paper is to analyse the current state of economic science in relation to the last economic slump. Although it is of course not possible to predict the future trajectories of economic theorising, taking into consideration the nature of the crisis the most feasible and potentially most fruitful areas are indicated.
The present work investigates the economic thought of the Cambridge Apostles, the famous élite intellectual group which counted J.M. Keynes among its members. In the first decades of the XX century the Apostles’ Society worked as a first-class think-tank where a cross-fertilization of feelings and ideas among some of the most brilliant minds of the time occurred in a peculiarly interdisciplinary context. G. E. Moore (1873-1958), one of the most influential British philosophers in the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, was the leader of the Apostles’ Society at the beginning of the century. His great book, Principia Ethica (1903), through a radical criticism of idealism, hedonistic utilitarianism, and empiricism, undermined the philosophical basis of Victorian conventional morality, and was enthusiastically greeted by the young Apostles. Moore indicated the states of consciousness consisting in the pleasure of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beauty as the greatest intrinsic goods; for them only he endorsed the performing any public or private duty. From the perspective of the historian of economic thought, there are three problems related to Moore’s impact on the Apostles. The first is the difference between the young and the mature Keynes’s adhesion to Moore’s teachings, as reported in My Early Beliefs (1938); the second relates to the divergent interpretations that the Apostles gave of Moore’s influence on them; the third contrasts Moore’s ‘unwordliness’ with the Apostles-economists’ intellectual and professional concerns. The first problem has been tackled by most authors who have studied Moore’s influence on Keynes, but the other two have been largely neglected. In particular, the paradox referred to in the third question has not been convincingly explained. Moreover, while in the last thirty years the philosophical foundations of Keynes’s economics have been the subject of a very extensive literature, and Moore’s influence has been duly acknowledged, the same cannot be said for Keynes’s fellow Apostles. The present research aims to assess the impact of such similar philosophical background on their views: it emphasizes, first, the simultaneous recurrence of ethical, social and political elements in the works of the Apostles-economists in the first decades of the XX century. Second, it points to some neglected features in Moore’s philosophy that shaped the Apostles’ concerns as well as their intellectual approach.
Culture & Political Economy: Adam Smith & Alfred Marshall
Tabur, 2012
Economics has become a reductive science that postulates a utility-maximizing individual abstracted from any and all social and cultural contexts. Today, both the friends and the enemies of this science agree in projecting this reductionism onto the history of mainstream economics. The present essay rescues the history of political economy from such standard reductionist histories. It does so by pointing out some of the profound and substantial roles played by ideas of culture within the writings of two acknowledged giants of the history of economics, Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. The first part of the paper makes use of some recent revisionist intellectual history that situates Smith’s Wealth of Nations within his larger project of illuminating the historical, political, moral as well as economic dimensions of modern commercial society. The second part presents some of my own research on Marshall, and shows how his transformation of classical into neo-classical economics arose by way of an injection of a conception of culture into the body of classical economic theory.
The Separation of Economics from Virtue: A Historical-Conceptual Introduction
The aim of this paper is to explain what philosophical commitments drove mainstream professional economists to understand their own discipline as leaving no space for ethics (including virtue) between, say, 1887 and 1976. In particular, I argue that economics embraced a technocratic conception of politics and science. An important theme of my paper is that philosophers, too, embraced and continue to embrace a number of commitments about philosophy and science that entrench a sharp division of labor between philosophers and economics and that keep not just ethics, but virtue outside of economics. Many of these philosophers’ commitments were adopted by economists such that they could assume, in practice, that there is a self-sufficient a-political domain of pure economics. So, in effect, this paper explores the origin and nature of a conceptual split between economics and ethics. There are two, subsidiary themes in my essay that are not fully worked out in it, but play a non-trivial role in the development that I sketch. First, I pay some attention to the role of so-called epistemic virtues that good economic inquirers need to possess in virtue of the split between economics and ethics. By ‘epistemic virtue’ I mean to refer to the moral character or moral properties of the scientific economist. I will not discuss the epistemic virtues commonly associated with scientists (e.g., patience, objectivity, disinterestedness, humility, etc.), although these do operate in the background, too, but I will call attention to those epistemic virtues that take on special urgency in light of the larger development. Second, the ways in which the expert scientist economist can (and cannot) assume to be agreeing with the values of the society she studies and hopes to advice as a policy scientist.