Economics as Social Science

Economics imperialism and the challenge of interdisciplinarity

Roberto Marchionatti, Mario Cedrini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138909298
• eBook ISBN: 9781317438335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

There is a growing consensus in social sciences that there is a need for interdisciplinary research on the complexity of human behavior. At an age of crisis for both the economy and economic theory, economics is called upon to fruitfully cooperate with contiguous social disciplines. The term 'economics imperialism' refers to the expansion of economics to territories that lie outside the traditional domain of the discipline. Its critics argue that in starting with the assumption of maximizing behaviour, economics excludes the nuances of rival disciplines and has problems in interpreting real-world phenomena.

This book focuses on a territory that persists to be largely intractable using the postulates of economics: that of primitive societies. In retracing the origins of economics imperialism back to the birth of the discipline, this volume argues that it offers a reductionist interpretation that is poor in interpretative power. By engaging with the neglected traditions of sociological and anthropological studies, the analysis offers suggestions for a more democratic cooperation between the social sciences.

Economics as Social Science is of great interest to those who study history of economic thought, political economy and the history of economic anthropology, as well as history of social sciences and economic methodology.

Part I

At the roots of economics imperialism

Classical and neoclassical economics and the issue of primitive societies

Part I is devoted to economists’ explanatory models of primitive societies in the history of economic thought.

Chapter 1 deals with Smith’s classical model of the “early and rude state of society” and Marx’s analysis of pre-capitalistic societies in his philosophical and economic works. Smith and Marx are shown to share the idea that primitive societies are affected, as Smith puts it, by the absence of division of labour, which is the engine of growth. The analyses of the two great classical economists are preceded by an excursus on the interpretations of savage peoples by philosophers from Montaigne to the Enlightenment, the purpose being to understand the intellectual context of the analysis of the economists.

Chapter 2 deals with the neoclassical-formalist model of rational choice applied to primitive man. The model was developed in the 1940s and 1950s by the anthropologists Raymond Firth and Melville Herskovitz; Robbins’s and Knight’s neoclassical economics clearly influenced their approach. Firth and Herskovitz described the primitive economy as a locus wherein rational choice is limited by customs and institutions, compelling individuals to behave irrationally. Increasing attention paid to non-market institutions by neoclassical economists since the 1970s has produced new interpretative models of primitive societies based on transaction costs and information-theoretic approaches. Richard Posner’s theory provides the most significant and ambitious model, which explains many distinctive primitive institutions as adaptations to the uncertainty of the environment or to the existence of high information costs. The influence of sociobiology in economics, essentially through the work of Jack Hirshleifer, and in anthropology with the birth of the behavioural ecology of hunter-gatherers, significantly strengthens Posner’s thesis of a rational (maximizing in the economic sense) behaviour of primitives.

1 The distant origins of economics imperialism

Classical economists and primitive societies

1.1 Travellers, philosophers and the savages

1.1.1 The travel literature, a source for philosophers’ reflections

In the second part of the eighteenth century, when Smith’s foundation of political economy took shape, information on the ‘savage nations’ of North America, Asia, West Africa and the Pacific was rather extensive. At the end of the 1870s, “the Great Map of Mankind” (a phrase used by the English philosopher and political thinker Edmund Burke in a letter of 9 June 1777, to the Scottish historian William Robertson, on the occasion of the publication of Robertson’s History of America) was considered well known: “the Great Map of Mankind is unrolled at once.” This was primarily all the result of the vast accumulation of travellers’ accounts over more than two centuries following the discovery of America, the great event that changed the perception of the world by Europeans and caused the encounter with ‘other’ new peoples. There follows a survey of the most important and influential among them.

In the first part of the sixteenth century, Giovanni da Verazzano’s and Jacques Cartier’s voyages of exploration in the service of the king of France to the Americas provided the first accounts of the native peoples of North America. Then published were Jean de Léry’s (1536–1613) Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil autrement dite Amérique (1578) and André Thevet’s (1516–92) Singularités de la France antarctique (1557) – France antarctique was a French colony established in Guanabara Bay at Rio de Janeiro which existed between 1555 and 1567. These two were the texts at the basis of Montaigne’s essai on the cannibals. These works testify to France’s role in the sixteenth century as an important centre of interest in the non-European worlds, in particular North America. This role intensified in the seventeenth century with publication of some of the most important works from the ethnographic point of view, rich with information on the manners and customs of the Canadian Indians. The first were the Voyages de la Nouvelle France (1619 and 1632) by the French explorer Samuel Champlain (1574–1635), “the father of New France”, and the Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1619) by the author and poet Marc Lescarbot (1570–1641), based on his expedition to Acadia, a colony of New France in north-eastern North America. They were followed by the Grand Voyage au pays des Huron (1632) by the French Franciscan missionary Gabriel Sagard-Theodat (1590–1640). Together with the Rélations des Jesuites de la Nouvelle-France – missionaries’ reports written in French and Latin, which appeared in print between 1632 and 1673 – these were the most important sources of knowledge on the Canadian Indians.

At the end of the seventeenth century, England already had an empire in the Caribbean and in North America, but it had mainly cross-border relationships with the North American natives. This popularized a superficial and misrepresented image of the Indians, and also a widespread hostility towards them.¹ The first important English collections, Richard Hakluyt’s Divers Voyages Concerning the Discovery of America (1582) and Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), consisted mostly of non-English sources; but the above-cited contemporaneous French literature was largely unknown in England at that time. Jesuit accounts were not translated into English and they became known only in the 1820s through the works of Charlevoix and Lafitau, the main sources for Adam Smith (and the Scottish philosophers of his time) in his discussion of the savage state of human history in his Glasgow Lectures.

The philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) played a crucial role in expanding knowledge about the American peoples in England. A great collector of travel books, Locke contributed to making the American savage the most interesting figure among the primitive peoples known in England at that time.² His famous phrase in the Two Treatises of Government (1689) – “in the beginning all the world was America” – meant that America was considered the beginning of civilization, a pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe: the state of nature, Locke maintained, was an historical human reality which existed in the America of his days. He was one of the promoters, together with the members of the Royal Society, of the printing of the four volumes of the famous collection of travels and voyages edited by Awnsham and John Churchill in 1704. The collection included many narratives printed in English for the first time, and which expanded and completed Richard Hakluyt’s collection of 1589. It also included a preface (often attributed to Locke) entitled “The Whole History of Navigation from its Original to This Time”. In the early eighteenth century, the Royal Society began to publish travel accounts in its Philosophical Transactions, thus enhancing knowledge of the New World and the recently discovered lands. The Churchill collection was reissued, being augmented from four to eight volumes in 1732 and 1747. Also the less original collection published by John Harris in 1705 was reissued in 1740. In 1745–47, Thomas Astley published the four-volume New General Collections of Voyages and Travels compiled by John Green and immediately translated into French by Antoine Francois Prévost, well known as Abbé Prévost (Histoire général des voyages, 1747–59), becoming the most comprehensive French source of world travel literature.

In the meantime, two fundamental works had been published in France: the above-mentioned books by Charlevoix and Lafitau – respectively the Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1722) and Moeurs des sauvages americains (1724). Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682–1761) and Joseph-Fracois Lafitau (1681–1746) were Jesuit missionaries in Canada in the two first decades of the 1700s. The book by Lafitau, who was in Canada from 1712 to 1717, is now considered the most important work produced by the French Jesuit community in the first half of the eighteenth century.³ Lafitau drew upon five years of ‘fieldwork’, and he furnished a detailed description of Iroquois practices. He rejected the characterization of the American Indians as peoples without religion, laws and government, considered an error committed by the first missionaries. He challenged this stereotype by providing an accurate reconstruction of the forms of government, marriage customs, educational systems, types of dwelling, clothing, wartime and peacetime activities, trade, diseases, funeral rituals, and languages spoken among the Iroquois and Hurons. Lafitau examined all these aspects of social life for traces of ancient times and concluded that there was not even one aspect of the American customs did not have an equivalent in classical Antiquity.⁴

To complete the picture, mention should be made of some other books influential at that time. First of all, the History of the Five Indian Nations (1727–47) written by the Scottish-born scientist, and close friend of Benjamin Franklin, Cadwallader Colden; his history of the Iroquois tribes was the first documentary on native American culture written in English and was considered America’s first history book. Also important was the Histoire de la Lousiane (1751–53, translated into English in 1763) written by the French (or Dutch) historian and naturalist Antoine-Simon La Page du Pratz (1695?–1775) who spent many years in Louisiana under the colonization scheme organized by John Law and the Companies of the Indies, and who had familiarity with the Natchez people. A peculiar but important contribution was made by Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan (1666–1715), a French imperial officer who lived in New France and studied the Huron, Algonquin and Iroquois peoples. In 1703 and 1704, he published three books, an amalgam of ethnographical analysis and radical social and political criticism which influenced many authors of the Enlightenment: Nouveaux voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale, his memoirs of his sojourn in New France; the sequel, Mémoires de l’Amerique septentrionale, and the imaginary dialogue between the author and a Huron chief Supplément aux voyages ou Dialogues avec le sauvage Adario. Lahontan’s emphasis on the natural lifestyle of savages, and their profound sense of liberty and egalitarianism, greatly influenced the tradition of social criticism of European institutions: in particular, indebted to his idealized representation of Amerindians, which incorporated many of the staple elements of the noble savage figure, was Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (see Ellingson 2001 and Harvey 2010).⁵

The nineteenth-century knowledge of savage peoples was completed by the voyages of discovery of new lands in the Pacific Ocean, undertaken by James Cook, Louis Antoine de Bougainville (who published in 1771 the well-known Voyage autour du monde) and Jean-Francois de La Pérouse, whose world circumnavigations greatly extended the hitherto scant information available on that part of the world. The two-volume work produced in 1756 by the French érudit Charles De Brosses, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes, had contained what may be the first occurrence of the words ‘Polynésie’ and ‘Australasie’. It furnished information that was useful for Cook’s and Bougainville’s explorations – and drew a new map of the world.

These descriptions of the peoples of new worlds, became the empirical foundation for a general rewriting of human history crucial for the Enlightenment project of a world historical science of mankind (see Rubiés (2002). These travel accounts influenced philosophical reflection from Montaigne to Rousseau, Diderot and the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers – and we have already mentioned Locke. Travel accounts and this philosophical reflection upon them were Smith’s sources on primitive societies. As regards the former source, as far as we know, Adam Smith had extensive knowledge of this travel literature. His library contained the most important collections of voyages (see Bonar 1932): Hakluyt’s, Churchill’s, Harris’s; the Philosophical Transactions volumes, and other more- or less-known travellers’ accounts. He possessed Pierre-Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix’s Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1722) and Joseph-Francois Lafitau’s Histoire des découvertes e des conquetes des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde (1733). Lafitau’s Moeurs des sauvages americains (1724) was not included in Smith’s library; however, we know that he was familiar with that text because Lafitau’s Moeurs, together with Clarlevoix’s Histoire, are the sources mentioned in his discussion of the savage stage of human history in his Glasgow Lectures. In general, these works were the ones most used and appreciated by the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers.⁶ In regard to the latter source, to which Smith himself, as a philosopher, contributed, Montesquieu’s reflection was crucial in the organization of his theoretical position (as well as that of many others).

1.1.2 Montesquieu’s philosophy of history and savage nations

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron of Montesquieu, one of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment, was the author who, in the mid-nineteenth century, more than any other, contributed to defining the issue and the method of analysis of the societies different from those of the West. In his great work De l’ésprit des lois (1748), Montesquieu laid the foundations for a philosophy of history.

Montesquieu’s starting point was the existence of a multiplicity of laws and customs, so that “the whole seems to be an immense expanse, or a boundless ocean” (Montesquieu 1750: 630), as many authors of the seventeenth century had observed. Unlike those authors, however, Montesquieu thought that he had been able to grasp the connecting ‘thread’ running through history. When men legislate, Montesquieu maintained, they are not driven by the caprice of fancy: the order of laws is variable, but not artificial. In every law a thought is revealed: when it is uncovered, so too is its meaning, that is, its ‘spirit’. Laws vary according to the circumstances: it is therefore not surprising that they are so different. To grasp its essence, a law must be considered in light of a combination of relationships, Montesquieu explains:

[Laws] should be in relation to the nature and principle of each government: whether they form it, as may be said of political laws; or whether they support it, as in the case of civil institutions. They should be in relation to the climate of each country, to the quality of its soil, to its situation and extent, to the principal occupation of the natives, whether husbandmen, huntsmen, or shepherds: they should have relation to the degree of liberty which the constitutions will bear; to the religion of the inhabitants, to their inclinations, riches, numbers, commerce, manners, and customs. In fine, they have relations to each other, as also to their origin, to the intent of the legislator, and to the order of things on which they are established; in all of which different lights they ought to be considered.

(Ibid.: 23)

When the relations composing the social organism are discovered, they must be gathered together and classified in order of importance. Montesquieu’s method consisted of showing the relationships between a certain particular expression of public and private life and the mentality of a nation as determined by its social necessities. Hence by reconstructing the social frame, understanding connections and concatenations, he sought to unravel the tangle of laws and to grasp its essence. As he writes in the preface of his book:

I have laid down the first principles, and have found that the particular c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Economics as Social Science
• Routledge Advances in Social Economics
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Origins, Evolution and Metamorphoses of Economics Imperialism, or the Need for an Interdisciplinary Research Programme on Human Behaviour
• PART I At the Roots of Economics Imperialism: Classical and Neoclassical Economics and the Issue of Primitive Societies
• PART II Economics and the Challenge of Primitive Societies: Anthropological Non-Formalist Approaches
• PART III The Problem of the ‘Other’: Economics and Unselfish Behaviour
• PART IV The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of Mauss’s Gift to the Development of A Non-Imperialist Economics
• Conclusions: The Myth of Economics Imperialism and the Possibility of a Non-Imperialist Economics
• Bibliography
• Index