The State of the History of Economics

Proceedings of the History of Economics Society

James P. Henderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781134785223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This collection explores emerging areas in the history of economics and provides a valuable insight into contemporary research in the field. The papers focus on four areas: * Science and Economics. Authors investigate how science is perceived and how its history is related, details early history of probability and examine 'cyberpunk' - a science fic

1
THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS
AND THE HISTORY OF
AGENCY

Andrew Pickering

I am honored to be asked to speak here, and I’m pleased because it gives me the chance to say that some of the recent writing that most interests me comes from historians of economics and adjacent fields.¹ But I have to enter the standard disclaimer, required of all aliens entering the US: “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the History of Economics Society.” So I don’t have any special knowledge of the history of economics, and most of what I do know I learned from members of this audience. I take it, therefore, that my brief is to talk about theory and historiography, about how we think about science and tell its history. That being the case, I will start off by talking about a double displacement that I see happening in the history of science—or, more realistically, that I would like to see happening there. Then I’ll talk about how the history of economics might look under these displacements.

To begin, we need a baseline, which, in the history of science, is the genre known as history of ideas. In its canonical form this tries to understand scientific ideas as evolving under their own inner logic, though much mileage has recently been got by sociologizing and contextualizing the picture. Thus the sociology of scientific knowledge approach has sought to display the social interests that sustain the particular bodies of knowledge that one finds associated with particular groups; and, less theoretically, the historiographic avant garde would probably agree that the best history of ideas is contextualist, relating specific ideas to their historical, cultural, social, etc., contexts. The point I want to stress, though, is that all these variants share the view that science is, above all else, a knowledge-producing enterprise; and that we should therefore put scientific knowledge at the centre of our historical accounts and arrange everything else around it.² The first displacement I want to recommend is, then, to do away with this obsession with knowledge. A strange suggestion, I know, but one that might seem less strange if I put forward an alternative.

Over the past decade or so, led by Bruno Latour (1987) and the theorists of the actor-network, science studies have become increasingly concerned with issues of agency (Pickering 1995a). And, to cut a long story short, out of that concern has grown an image of science as a zone of encounter between human and nonhuman agency—a place of struggle where human agency in its many guises (the scale and social relations of human actors, their interests and disciplined practices, and so on) is reciprocally reconfigured in relation to the contours and powers of nonhuman agents like machines, instruments, and experimental set-ups. Science, that is, and technology, which is not essentially different from science on this account, is in the business of dealing with nonhuman powers—warding them off, capturing them, seducing them—in a process that continually reconfigures science itself. And this theoretical development suggests to me a historiographic one: namely, that instead of writing the history of science as a history of ideas, we should write it as a history of agency: a history of the becoming of social agents in relation to the becoming of material agents— machines, drugs, and whatever. I should add that writing a history of agency does not entail the denial that scientists do produce ideas and knowledge; it suggests instead that we think of knowledge as part and parcel of struggles in fields of agency, as one of our ways of coping with otherness. A history of agency would thus be a rebalanced one, that went beyond the traditional obsession with knowledge to include a recognition of science’s material and social engagements.³

So far so good, I hope. Now for my second displacement. There is a feeling in the world that over the past few decades we have done too many microstudies and written too many specialized monographs, and that for our own benefit, as well as that of our students and the literate public, it is time we started again producing the kind of synthetic overviews that historians used to produce (Secord 1993). I certainly feel this—perhaps because I have done too many microstudies myself, but also because I think that historical syntheses can be politically important in helping to take stock of just who we are, what the late twentieth century is like, and how it got to be that way. So the second historiographic displacement I want to recommend is the construction of historical big pictures, capable of making sense of the wealth of specialized information already at our disposal, and indicating directions for future research. But then, to go back to my first displacement, what would a big picture of the history of agency look like? My answer goes like this.

Just as scientific knowledge always occupies center stage in the history of ideas, so the central foci of concern in a macrohistory of agency would be the great and enduring sites of the intersection of human and nonhuman agency—the battlefield, for example (understood as iconic of military endeavor in general), and, since the Industrial Revolution, the factory (understood as iconic of industrial production). And that is my basic idea: we should collectively engage in writing synthetic narratives of the history of science as a history of agency centered on places like the factory and the battlefield, as the places from which sciences continually emerge and to which they continually return. Of course, I say, “we should” try writing that way because a macrohistory of agency doesn’t exist at the moment; it is a vision of the future, though Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) might also serve as a manifesto for what I have in mind. So what I want to do for the rest of this talk is to think about how one might start to fill in the outlines, with particular reference to the history of economics. My idea is to try to exemplify what amounts to a shift in sensibilities that goes with my historiographic displacements; to show, in other words, that the overall history of economics might look somewhat different from the perspective of a history of agency than it does from that of the history of ideas. And my hope is to persuade you that the differences are interesting and important and worth pursuing. And worth correcting, too: I said at the start that I am not a historian of economics, and I am by no means confident that all that follows will stand up to expert scrutiny. I want to acknowledge now that in trying to get to grips with the field I have benefited enormously from numerous E-mail tutorials with Robert Leonard—thanks very much, Robert—but I have to enter another standard disclaimer here: Robert deserves the credit, but egregious errors that remain are definitely my own responsibility.

Now for the history of economics and the history of agency. The first point to make is that the history of agency might sound like bad news for the history of science in general, inasmuch as it denies the specialness of science asserted by the history of ideas. Instead of seeing science as an autonomous essence existing in its own Platonic realm, which only occasionally descends to the sublunary world of production and destruction—from the light to the darkness—the history of agency sees science as being typically there in the sublunary plane, as just one part of the bigger story of human production, consumption, and destruction. It might further seem that the history of agency is especially bad news for historians of economics, since economists have hardly ever engaged in the struggles with material agency that it thematizes.⁴ But there is, fortunately, another way of looking at things. It could equally well be said that the history of agency should be great news for historians of economics. Why? Because industrialization is at the heart of the history of agency over the past couple of hundred years, and economics is, in some sense, the science of this process: with Adam Smith, at least, economics as a discipline has emerged directly from and has continually intertwined with the history of machines, factories, disciplined labor, capital, and so on. Of course, economics was not the only science to emerge from the Industrial Revolution; Michel Foucault (1979, for example) has a nice line on the emergence of the social sciences as techniques for managing an industrializing population, and, of course, many natural sciences were either born of industrialization or significantly inflected by it—John Desmond Bernal (1953a,b) compiled some useful lists: thermodynamics and the steam engine, electromagnetic theory and the telegraph, microbiology and brewing, and so on. But there is a difference amongst these industrial sciences that I find worth pondering upon, and which concerns their underlying ontologies.

The nineteenth-century social sciences that interested Foucault were purely about human beings, about counting people and classifying them; they were, one can say, humanist. At the opposite end of the spectrum, one finds natural sciences like thermodynamics or electromagnetism which are anti-humanist, inasmuch as they theorize a world from which human beings might just as well be absent. Such social and natural sciences, then, instantiate the dichotomy of Nature and Society that one might think of as characteristic of modernity. But economics is different. It has, or had, a mixed ontology of people and things: machines, factories, labor, circuits of production and consumption. In this sense, economics was the first great posthumanist or cyborg science of modernity; the nineteenth-century equivalent of alchemy. I mention this because it gives economics a special place in the history of agency, as the symmetric science of the coupling of the human and the nonhuman. (I also mention it because it contradicts Bruno Latour’s argument in We Have Never Been Modern (1993) that the dualist separation of Nature and Culture is the motor of modernity—far from slowing things down, cyborg sciences like economics are centrally concerned with speeding things up.)

So, economics as a field of thought is crucially connected into my speculative history of agency via its ontology of production and consumption. But there are some less obvious connections that I also want to mention. One can think of industrialization as, first of all, an attack on the body—a devaluation of human agency in relation to the agency of the new machines: steam engines, spinning jennies, and so on. But it is slowly dawning upon me that, running in parallel with this attack on the body, the nineteenth century was also the site of an attack on the mind—a proliferation of attempts to industrialize thought. I first began to see this when I read a paper by Simon Schaffer called “Babbage’s intelligence: calculating engines and the factory system” (1994). As is well known, between 1822 and 1834 Charles Babbage was engaged in ultimately unsuccessful attempts to build his famous Difference and Analytical Engines, which we now think of as mechanical forerunners of the electronic computer. But what fascinates me about them is how closely engaged they were with contemporary developments in industry and economic theory.

Thus Babbage’s inspiration in the construction of his engines was the late eighteenth-century program of the Frenchman Gaspard Riche de Prony, who extended the principle of the division of manual labor, characteristic of the factory system, to the mental labor of calculation. “By his own account inspired by Adam Smith’s paean to the division of labour in the first chapters of The Wealth of Nations,” as Lorraine Daston (1994,188) puts it, “I [Prony] conceived all at once the idea to apply the same method to… manufacture logarithms as one manufactures pins” (quoted ibid., 193). And Babbage simply took this characteristic strategy of the Industrial Revolution one step further, seeking to build machines that would emulate the operations of Prony’s disciplined human calculators. The move from the attack on the body to the attack on the mind is beautifully played out here. Of course, it might seem that, with Babbage’s machines, we drift away from the history of economics into that of mathematics and astronomy, but not entirely. Although Babbage is primarily remembered as a mathematician, he was also an economist (see also Romano 1982). And in just the period that he was working on his calculating engines, Babbage was intensely interested in understanding the political and domestic economy of the factory, publishing a highly regarded book entitled On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures in 1832. These two projects, furthermore—the construction of calculating engines and economic enquiries into the factory system—were not, in fact, independent of one another: as Schaffer (1994, 209) notes, the project of economically regulating labor by atomizing and mechanizing the production process became known as the “Babbage principle” and was understood to apply “equally to the regulation of the factory and the calculating engines.” Here, then, we can see how the history of economics and the history of the nonhuman computer have intertwined at the heart of the history of agency.

This is most of what I wanted to say about Babbage, but before leaving him behind I have one remark to add. I started by talking about a double displacement in the historiography of science, from the micro to the macro and from ideas to agency. But actually there is a third displacement that I would also like to encourage, and which I thought I would save until I had an example to discuss, namely a move from contextualist history to what one might call a history of reciprocal alignments. My idea is this. The standard way of thinking about the developments just mentioned would be a contextualist one. One could think about the factory and economic thought as providing an explanatory context for the history of the Difference and Analytical Engines. The division of physical labor might count as part of the explanation of why Babbage organized his attack on the mind in the way that he did. This would not be a totally mistaken way of thinking, but it would be, I think, importantly misleading, in the following sense. The tendency in contextualist history is to write as if context were a fixed and reliable explanatory resource, something that independently endures and hence more or less causes changes in something else. In contrast to this, I want to emphasize that in the developments at issue content and context were, as the physicists say, strongly coupled to one another, and were reciprocally transformed in relation to one another. To give an example of what I mean, the material work of building Babbage’s engines stretched English machinists and machine tools to the limit. Great engineers of the period like Joseph Whitworth circulated through the engine projects, developing their skills and building their reputations there, before establishing themselves as independent producers. As Schaffer (1994, 210, emphasis added) puts it, “The calculating engines were themselves products of the system of automatic manufacture which Babbage sought to model. [And at the same time] They were some of that system’s most famous and mo...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS AND THE HISTORY OF AGENCY
• 2. THE HISTORY OF CLASSICAL AND FREQUENTIST THEORIES OF PROBABILITY
• 3. CYBERPUNK AND CHICAGO
• 4. HETEROGENEOUS LABOR IN A SIMPLE RICARDIAN MODEL
• 5. INTERNATIONAL TRADE, MACHINERY, AND THE REMUNERATION OF LABOR: A REEXAMINATION OF THE ARGUMENT IN THE THIRD EDITION OF RICARDO’S PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND TAXATION
• 6. REFLECTIONS ON SCHUMPETER’S HISTORY OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS IN LIGHT OF HIS UNIVERSAL SOCIAL SCIENCE
• 7. JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES ON SOCIO-ECONOMIC CLASSES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CAPITALISM
• 8. HICKS AND LINDAHL ON MONETARY INSTABILITY: ELASTICITY OF PRICE EXPECTATIONS VERSUS ELASTICITY OF INTEREST EXPECTATIONS
• 9. (DIS)TRUSTING THE TALE: WERNER SOMBART AND THE NARRATIVE OF ECONOMICS
• 10. CROMWELL’S OCCUPATION OF IRELAND AS JUDGED FROM PETTY’S OBSERVATIONS AND MARX’S THEORY OF COLONIALISM
• 11. VINCENT DE GOURNAY, OR “LAISSEZ-FAIRE WITHOUT LAISSEZ-PASSER”
• 12. STORM OVER ECONOMIC THOUGHT: DEBATES IN FRENCH ECONOMIC JOURNALS, 1750–70