[T] Institutional History of Economics

to the forum

Coordinators: Esther-Mirjam Sent and Albert Jolink
Email: e.m.sent@fm.ru.nl; a.jolink@uva.nl

EAEPE's Institutional History of Economics Research Area invites paper proposals that contribute to one of its following seven theoretical perspectives:

  1. The approach to analysis is based on an evaluation of relevant tendencies and linkages in actual economics - instead of a methodology that sanctifies fictions and diverts attention from the difficult task of analysing the practice and culture of economics.
  2. The analysis is open-ended and interdisciplinary in that it draws upon relevant material in psychology, anthropology, politics, and history - instead of a definition of history of economics in terms of a rigid method that is applied indiscriminately to a wide variety of economic approaches.
  3. The conception of economics is of a cumulative and evolutionary process unfolding in historical time in which economists are faced with chronic information problems and radical uncertainty about the future - instead of approaches to theorizing that focus exclusively on the product of this process.
  4. The concern is to address and encompass the interactive, social process through which economics is formed and changed - instead of a theoretical framework that takes economists and their interests as given.
  5. It is appropriate to regard economics itself as a social institution, necessarily supported by a network of other social institutions - instead of an orientation that takes economics itself as an ideal or natural order and as a mere aggregation of individual economists.
  6. It is evaluated how the socio-economic system is embedded in a complex ecological and environmental system - instead of a widespread tendency to ignore ecological and environmental considerations or consequences in the history of economics.
  7. The inquiry seeks to contribute not only to history of economics but also to economics - instead of an orthodox outlook that ignores the possibility of such cross-fertilization.