PART I - THE WAR OF IDEAS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 April 2010
Summary
Part I is organized into seven chapters. The main questions tackled concern the role of ideas in social action and the problem of autonomy in the economic behaviour of the individual agent. The logical structure of the argument is as follows.
Chapter 1 states what is perhaps the single key premiss shared by economic philosophers influential in the evolution of economic ideas and belonging to conflicting poles of the ideological spectrum – the notion that the ideas put forward by economists and political philosophers powerfully affect social behaviour and the actual conduct of human affairs. Textual evidence is then produced in order to support and detail empirically this claim.
Chapters 2 to 4 give an account of the main challenges posed by the growth of scientific knowledge to the basic assumption of economic philosophy (chapter 1). Particular attention is devoted (chapters 3 and 4) to the origins and nature of the ‘economic man’ concept, that is, the normalization of human behaviour developed by economic science and leading to the complete abstraction of the beliefs and opinions of the individual agent in the explanation of his ordinary transactions. Chapter 4 gathers up the threads of the preceding chapters in an attempt to consider how the ‘economic man’ concept (chapter 3) fits in with the ‘man–machine’ doctrine (chapter 2).
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- Beliefs in ActionEconomic Philosophy and Social Change, pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991