Evolution of Systems of Knowledge [Part II]
The emerging dichotomy between the political and the economy
Having shown the process of and the conditions leading to the fragmentation of whole knowledge systems, it is time to consider that curious science of political economy. As is shown in the very broad sketch below juxtaposition the separation of knowledge about the social world developed in the Anglophone world along rather different lines as compared with Continental Europe.
The Consitution of the subject of Political Economy:
Commonly, the origin of political economy is identified with the advent of the European Enlightenment: the subject of political economy emerging as especially prominent in the French and Scottish strands. [1] This is not to say that in previous times there has not existed writings for activities such as ‘commerce’, ‘economy’, ‘budgeting’, i.e. ‘householding’, though those mere analytical provisions did not constitute a thematic unity and so did not imply a consciousness of economics as its own comprehensive field of knowledge. [2] The pre-modern world was one where the ‘economical’ used to be embedded in society: Production was not for a person’s or group’s own gain, but existed within a pattern of a closed group (or system) in which either reciprocity or redistribution served as the underlying principle. [3] While in Classical Antiquity there was hence most likely no political economy since production did not exist in the order of knowledge itself, in the 17th and 18th centuries there arose, as mentioned beforehand, a general domain, ‘the ground and object of ‘economy’ in the Classical age’, that of wealth: ‘a very coherent and very well-stratified layer that compromises and contains, like so many partial objects, the notions of value, price, trade, circulation, income, interest.’ [4]
Adam Smith is widely attributed as the first scholar of political economy who put forth a systematic critique of at the time dominant Mercantilist and Physiocratic schools of thought and national economic practice. As argued above, the origins of political economy implicated still a pre-disciplinary understanding of science at first as most writers on social theory during the Enlightenment were polymaths, and concerned themselves with a great range of subjects of scientific inquiry. [5] Early debates on political economy were embedded in the societal and moral edifice of their time as is illustrated by the fact that Smith himself, valued his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) as his magnum opus and not as is widely assumed his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). In his self-understanding he was principally a moral philosopher rather than a political economist: his Wealth of Nations is the ‘specialised application to the detailed field of action of general theories of social behaviour contained in the earlier work’, i.e. his Theory of Moral Sentiments. [6] Social and economic theories from the Mercantilists, the Physiocrats, the classical political economists up to Karl Marx’s critique of political economy were thus also elaborated contextually, both thematically and methodologically: it was only since the latter’s questioning of bourgeois classical political economists’ categories of thought which in his opinion concealed and thereby legitimised rather than demystified and challenged existing power relations in the economic edifice of society at the time that lead to an evolving split between the ‘(socio-)political’ and the ‘economic’ spheres of scientific interrogation also labeled as a ‘subjectivist turn’ creating an ‘axiomatic 'economics' sharply demarcated from the remaining social science domain.’ [7]
The split:
In the Anglophone world, the ‘marginal revolution’ has commenced already in the 1870s [8] and so it was the Marginalist William Stanley Jevons who re-baptised the field of political economy as ‘economics’. [9] The formal split between economics and sociology was to be made institutionally enshrined with the establishment of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 1885. As this development proceeded, it was first and foremost Norwegian American Thorstein Bunden Veblen who began to model the German Historical School and established with his works the Institutionalist School at the turn of the century. Since 1895 he moreover served for the next ten years as the managing editor of the newly founded Journal of Political Economy, voicing thus like many other contributors their discontent with the advancement of economic thought in its separate disciplinary domain.
As can be observed in above juxtaposition as well is an Anglophone tendency for empiricism, culminating in the foundation of a self-proclaimed objective, positive economics, while in Continental Europe there is apparent a certain inclination for philosophical embedding and anti-positivism. Those two developments were surely not going to be forging ahead in isolation and when they got in contact with each other there happened a major clash.
Der Methodenstreit:
The so-called Methodenstreit (German for 'method dispute') commenced from the 1880s onwards in the German-speaking parts of Europe between the Historical School, represented by Gustav von Schmoller, and the slowly constituting Austrian School at the time, represented by the Viennese marginalist economist Carl Menger. The fundamental bone of contention was the significance of either inductive or deductive research methods of which the former was held up in high regard by the Historical School and the latter to be praised by the Marginalist School. Schmoller advocated hence a ‘methodological collectivism’ meaning that the central point of departure for research should be society at large, while Menger opposed this position by arguing for a ‘methodological individualism’ meaning that the primary object of research must necessarily be the individual and its actions. It can be inferred that the Marginalist School succeeded in establishing its methodological toolbox as the hegemonic research tradition in the field of economics. The German Historical School as well as the Anglophone Institutionalist School continued to propagate their inductive methodology but were merging predominantly into the newly constituting discipline of sociology however.
Political Economy — a means of emancipation or socio-economic discipline:
It thus seems that social theory was especially prone to experience the disciplinary force of leading elitist ranks of society since emerging social science was perceived to serve as a powerful tool to create a vast pool of knowledge for emancipatory social movements advocating more participatory arrangements in the political and economic sphere, gender equality, human rights, peace and the like, in order to make sense of – and to potentially alter – a great many aspects of the societal edifice. Enlightenment thought and the spirit to found knowledge based autonomously from divine orders of any kind necessarily had to confront the latter’s ontological existence, of which the American War of Independence 1775-1783 and the French Revolution of 1789 are prime illustrations of this process. Emancipatory knowledge, i.e. knowledge freed from the tutelage of some authority, be it sacred scriptures, institutionalised religious bodies or arising from royal or bourgeois dominion, were found to be ring-fenced in order to not challenge the order of its times. In essence, the history of the separation of social science disciplines can be read as a reaction against the challenge and agitation of various open-minded, emancipatory social movements ready to change their contemporary state of social relations. [10] This explains the de-institutionalisation, i.e. lack of appointment to institutions of research and training, of major social scientists during the 19th century, among them Karl Marx, and moreover account for the ensuing academic marginalisation of Marxian-inspired scholars ever since. [11] It also explains the role of the Marginalist-Utalitarian School and the German Staatswissenschaften in this process of academic fragmentation which can be clearly attributed as having emerged as a reaction to socialist agitation and especially as a professionalising intellectual critique of its mostly non-academic Marxist counterpart. [12] The Marxist threat was successfully contained by eventually neutralising it in the academia once and for all by way of mainly pushing it in a non-threatening environment along with other heterodox schools of thought like the German Historical or the Anglophone Institutional School in the emergent discipline of sociology, for instance, as hinted at above already.
Sources:
[1] Hont, I. and Ignatief, M. (1983) Wealth and virtue: The shaping of political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Tribe, K. (2003) ‘Continental political economy from the physiocrats to the marginal revolution’, in Porter, T. M. and Ross, D. (eds.) The Cambridge history of science: Volume 7, the modern social sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 154-170.
[2] Burkhardt, J., Spahn, P. and Oexle, O. G. (2004) ‘Wirtschaft’, in Brunner, O., Conze, W. and Koselleck, R. (eds.) Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, pp. 511-594.
[3] Polanyi, K. (1957) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
[4] Foucault, M. (1994) The order of things: An archeology of the human sciences, New York, NY: Random House, p. 166.
[5] Jessop, B. and Sum, N.-L. (2001) ‘Pre-disciplinary and post-disciplinary perspectives’, in Forum, pp. 89-101.
[6] Winch, D. (1978) Adam Smith's Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[7] van der Pijl, K. (2009) A survey of global political economy (Version 2.1), [online] available at: <https://libcom.org/files/A%20survey%20of%20global%20political%20economy.pdf> [Last accessed on 28th December 2024], p. ix.
[8] Jaffé, W. (1983) ‘Leon Walras's role in the "marginal revolution" of the 1870s (1972)’, in Walker, D. A. (ed.) William Jaffé’s essays on Walras, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 288-310.
[9] van der Pijl, K. (2015) ‘Global political economy and the separation of academic disciplines’, in Fouskas, V. K. (ed.) The politics of international political economy: A survey, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 3-19.
[10] Ibid.
[11] van der Pijl, K. (2009) A survey of global political economy (Version 2.1), [online] available at: <https://libcom.org/files/A%20survey%20of%20global%20political%20economy.pdf> [Last accessed on 28th December 2024], p. ix.
[12] Chilcote, R. H. (2000) Comparative inquiry in politics and political economy: Theories and issues, Boulder, CO: Westview Press; van der Pijl, K. (2015) ‘Global political economy and the separation of academic disciplines’, in Fouskas, V. K. (ed.) The politics of international political economy: A survey, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 3-19.