The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

C.M. Melenovsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000572278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This handbook advances the interdisciplinary field of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) by identifying thirty-five topics of ongoing research. Instead of focusing on historically significant texts, it features experts talking about current debates. Individually, each chapter provides a resource for new research. Together, the chapters provide a thorough introduction to contemporary work in PPE, which makes it an ideal reader for a senior-year course.

The handbook is organized into seven parts, each with its own introduction and five chapters:
I. Frameworks
II. Decision-Making
III. Social Structures
IV. Markets
V. Economic Systems
VI. Distributive Justice
VII. Democracy

The "Frameworks" part discusses common tools and perspectives in PPE, and the "Decision-making" section shows different approaches to the study of choice. From there, parts on "Social Structures, " "Markets" and "Economic Systems" each use tools from the three PPE disciplines to study and distinguish parts of society. The next part explains dominant theories and challenges to the paradigm of "Distributive Justice." Finally, a part on "Democracy" offers five challenges to current democratic practice.

PART I Frameworks

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808983-1

Introduction to Part I: Frameworks

In uniting three different disciplines, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) has an array of traditions, tools, and methods it can draw from. However, there are certain perspectives and approaches that are most commonly used. To set the stage for the varied chapters to come, the first section covers broader themes and perspectives used in PPE research. Instead of being united around a central subject matter, these chapters introduce ideas used to analyze different social matters.

In the first chapter of this section, Geoffrey Brennan and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord defend a particular view of PPE as a research agenda. For them, PPE is a necessary complement to existing disciplines. It does not seek to replace or displace Philosophy, Political Science, or Economics. Instead, there is recognition that we understand social phenomena best when we can view them simultaneously from different perspectives. They develop this idea in two ways. First, they distinguish specialization within intellectual pursuits from specialization in economic production. This contrast shows why we cannot assume that the division of epistemic labor into distinct disciplines yields the same positive results as the division of productive labor. Second, they emphasize that the three PPE disciplines each have certain tendencies that can create tensions between them. To best understand complex social phenomena, these tensions need to be resolved and interdisciplinary investigation forces that resolution. They catalog seven points of contention. Altogether, the chapter motivates PPE as a truly interdisciplinary academic venture, complementing each of the existing disciplines as it continues to grow.

Across the social sciences, understanding advances through the use of models. This is especially obvious in economics, where models of human decision-making that were used to model markets are now used to model broader political and social interactions. While the proliferation of model-based thinking predates the use of computers, we now have a greater capacity to build sophisticated models with more complex interactions. Questions remain, however, about exactly what we learn from a model. Models enable control over variables and can therefore seem similar to experimental methods, but models are not studying the real world. They are representations of the real world. Perhaps they are abstractions, or generalizations, or simplifications. Regardless, it is not obvious what conclusions we can draw about reality from a model. In the second chapter, “On Models and Their Uses,” James Johnson provides a general account of what models do. He argues against a standard rationale that models are used to generate hypotheses that can be tested in the real world. Instead, he argues that models are fables. They are fictions that condense reality down to the core ideas needed to make a point. In this way, what models do is direct our thought to something about the world that is best presented in the simpler format that the model provides.

Often, social phenomena are analyzed in a simple way. We might look to an authority and suppose that people act in accordance with that authority, or we might imagine a representative agent and suppose that everyone acts in the way that the agent acts. Of course, reality is often much more complicated than this. For much interaction, different agents have different information and different motivations. They each respond to the unique circumstances they face, which include the choices made by other similarly situated agents. To analyze the dynamics of this kind of interaction, we need new tools. In “Complexity,” Fred D’agnostino explains the newer field of Complexity Studies. Many different fields study complex phenomena – evolutionary biology, economics, neurology, and sociology to name a few. Across these fields, there are commonalities and tools. D’agnostino introduces the history of this field and then identifies its object of study, complex systems. He shows the commonly used ideas to understand complex systems and then identifies the places in political science, economics, and philosophy where this approach can be fruitfully applied.

In the fourth chapter, Vanessa Wills emphasizes the views of a particularly influential PPE scholar. There are, of course, many important figures associated with all three PPE disciplines. John Stewart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, Amartya Sen, and Elinor Ostrom are mentioned frequently in this handbook. However, the most influential writer must be Karl Marx. It is hard for anyone to rival Marx in terms of the impact on Politics, Philosophy, Economics, and world history. In her chapter, Wills asks what Marx's own attitude towards PPE as an interdisciplinary project would be. While he started writing on Philosophy, his later work was focused on Economics. Was there one field that he thought had greater importance? Wills argues that Marx himself sought to unify study and this required taking up a particular perspective. His approach was historical materialism; to recognize the course of history as best explained by the development of productive capacity. So, rather than simply unifying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Marx sought to unify all social science as a form of history. He also argued against any “objective” analysis that was divorced from a social perspective. Instead, he explicitly argued from a proletarian perspective because it had the potential to free all of mankind from alienation and exploitation.

In the last chapter of the section, Ann Cudd explains recent work on four topics that have been advanced from an explicitly Feminist perspective. Each topic draws on and contributes to interdisciplinary work in PPE. First, she offers a general account of the nature of oppression and how it manifests itself. Rather than being a single force, oppression in an interlocking network of norms, incentives, and beliefs that might be individually insignificant but together cause deep harm. Second, she emphasizes the ways that the distribution of caring labor manifests injustice. This provides a clear example of how myriad social causes, some obvious and some subtle, produce systematic differences in opportunities for men and women. Third, she examines the ways that our preferences are influenced by the social structure. Without knowledge or intention, the preferences we form can reinforce existing patterns of patriarchy. Finally, she turns to the question of whether capitalism is best understood as a force for alleviating or enforcing the oppression of women.

1 PPE as an Intellectual Enterprise

Geoffrey Brennan and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

DOI: 10.4324/9780367808983-2

1 The General Case for (Some) Interdisciplinary Work

Anything that throws light on its subject matter also casts shadows. So much is just in the nature of light. And those shadows cannot be dispersed simply by increasing the intensity of the light: doing that just makes the shadows deeper. Of course, if the intensity of the light is reduced, so is the capacity to see anything clearly. If you want to illuminate the shadows, you have to come at things from different perspectives: you have to shine some light, simultaneously, from different angles. And as every theatre-lighting engineer knows, in order to establish a shadow-free stage, you have to secure an appropriate balance among the various light sources.

This picture animates our view of PPE – that is, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics – as an intellectual enterprise. Bringing philosophy, political science, and economics together in the study of social and political institutions sheds light and banishes shadows in ways that no subset of these three disciplines could possibly accomplish. For example, economists shed invaluable light on markets, efficiency, incentives, and trade-offs, but regularly ignore the formal and informal institutions that structure choices and social interdependence; and economists (almost as a matter of professional pride) steer clear of questions of rights, or justice, or value. Meanwhile, political scientists bring a deep understanding of institutions that structure choices and create social interdependence, along with their origin and structure and effect. Political scientists also explicitly consider positive rights and values as they find expression through and in those institutions. Yet, political scientists often leave to one side perverse incentives and markets (except as phenomena to be regulated or left alone) and questions concerning institutionally transcendent rights, justice, and values. Philosophers, of course, talk ad nauseam about rights, justice, and value, and they are fully engaged with questions concerning ideal political institutions and perfect markets, but they regularly ignore actual social and political institutions and how they work, or fail to work, and the incentives, perverse and otherwise, that they create.

It is worth emphasizing at the outset that this view of PPE is both pro- and counter-disciplinary. It is pro-disciplinary in that it insists that disciplines are crucial sources of illumination and are indispensable.¹ However, because the picture highlights what each of the disciplines (inevitably) occludes, it foregrounds the importance of reaching across disciplinary boundaries.

Reaching across these boundaries, though, is a huge challenge. Often, the philosopher will be drawing distinctions that seem pointless or fetishistic to the economist and political scientist. Or the economist will be making points that will seem to the philosopher and the political scientist totally beside the point. Or political scientists will be insisting on pieces of empirical reality or aspects of the current political process that do not seem to the economists or the philosophers to fit into any larger picture of what really matters.

In our experience, genuine interdisciplinary communication requires a certain creative imagination and patience as well as mutual respect and trust from all parties: otherwise, there is simply a lot of talking at cross-purposes (which frequently hides mutual misunderstandings and disagreements that might, once recognized, be fruitfully explored). And if that is the outcome, there will be a consensus among all participants that, whatever else, the exercise of trying to talk to one's disciplinary neighbors is not worth the time.² As a matter of empirical fact, the amount of intellectual engagement between disciplinary departments (at least within the Humanities and Social Sciences) seems, in most places, to be negligible. It would simply not occur to the average economist to attend a seminar in the Philosophy department for example. Of course, time and intellectual effort are scarce – and the professional rewards are greater within, and senses of obligation greater towards, one's own patch. If practice is any guide, it seems that prevailing norms within the modern university do not encourage – and in many cases actively discourage – serious interdisciplinary engagement. If that is a fact, as we believe it to be, then it is one that deserves recognition, at the very least because it forms part of the environment within which PPE is to be pursued.

We should note that our particular view of PPE is not the only one available. One might, for example, advocate PPE as the “right way” to do normative social theory – that PPE ought to replace Political and Social Philosophy, or that it ought to replace Economics and/or Political Science as separate activities. Such a view harks back to an earlier period when disciplinary boundaries were less clearly drawn – and sees PPE as recapturing the mental landscape of giants like Smith and Hume. The folk version of this conception is that Philosophy brings to Economics a broader set of motivations and a richer (and more plausible) normative framework; while Economics and Political Science bring to Philosophy a greater recognition of the relevance of facts and a more practical impulse; while Economics and Philosophy both bring to Political Science a greater analytic structure and hence more theoretical rigor. All these additions are desirable, but such an approach treats PPE as a direct rival to the component disciplines. It treats PPE as operating, in the final analysis, on the same level as, and competing with, the individual disciplines, rather than as depending crucially on them. We hope it will be clear that this is not how we see things.

There is a third view of PPE that is not really interdisciplinary at all. This view is that each discipline has some things that it can learn from its neighbors – a mathematical technique that, for example, Philosophy might usefully borrow from Economics; or robust empirical findings about politics that Economics might absorb from Political Science; or a probing distinction from Philosophy that Political Science might embrace. To the extent that such borrowing makes for better Philosophy or better Economics, or better Political Science, there can be no serious objection to it. But this third view involves a resolutely disciplinary perspective, in that the test of success is whether something is added to the borrowing/raiding discipline. PPE, on our reading, appropriately has broader aspirations.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Frameworks, Introduction to Part I
• Part II: Decision-Making, Introduction to Part II
• Part III: Social Structures, Introduction to Part III
• Part IV: Markets, Introduction to Part IV
• Part V: Economic Systems, Introduction to Part V
• Part VI: Distributive Justice, Introduction to Part VI
• Part VII: Democracy, Introduction to Part VII
• Index