Economic Theory and Society: A Plea for Process Analysis

That the social sciences have grown up linked with their subject matter presents a unique challenge to historians. They have not only to unravel the complex strands in the evolution of theory but have also to discover the relationships between doctrine and the social milieu both of which are always changing. In my view they have not answered this challenge successfully. One approach of the historian has been explicitly to exclude the social context when viewing the development of theory and to ignore such matters as the application of theory to policy, the environment in which economists work, and the reception of economics by laymen. Mark Blaug has followed this path to some extent in his important textbook. A second approach is to concentrate on the theoretical ideas of a single author, speculating only incidentally and unsystematically about how his ideas were stimulated, influenced, transmitted, applied, and received. These two approaches leave unanswered many important questions. There have, however, been other attempts to deal with aspects of the relationship between the development of economic theory and its social context. In this paper I shall first comment briefly on this literature and second suggest a possible framework for analysis and research. I