THE DULLNESS OF THE eND OF hISTORY:

The demise of political economy began in the late 19th century. As academia became more professionalized and specialized, political economy gave way to its successor disciplines -- economics, sociology, political science, and the like. By its midcentury nadir, economists hardly interacted with researchers in those other fields.

The transition from a field of creative social visionaries to one of specialized technocrats is epitomized by the story of Alfred Marshall and his star student, John Maynard Keynes. Each had a foot in both worlds and was ambivalent about the change. In many ways, Marshall was the archetype of the 19th-century political economist. Keynes eulogized him, writing that he exemplified the economist who was a "mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher. ... No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard ... as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician."

Ironically, Marshall's 1890 Principles of Economics -- for three generations the field's definitive textbook -- marked a decisive transition from this comprehensive vision of political economy. Marshall worked to professionalize and eventually narrow the field. Keynes, despite his flirtations with probability theory and philosophy and his bold vision for transforming economic policy, cemented the position of economists as technocrats -- the furthest thing from the aloof, incorruptible artist. The macroeconomic management he advocated requires expert technicians; accordingly, the mid-20th century saw the profession churn out a class of specialized workers. History, politics, sociology, philosophy, and law all drained out of economics.

This is not to say that economics did not incubate any new ideologies after Keynes. University of Chicago economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and George Stigler were central to inspiring the "neoliberal" ideology that defined the political careers of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Like the political economists of old, their perspectives were far broader and bolder than those of their contemporaries. But unlike the political economists of old, they did not offer radical social reform or innovation. Instead they advocated a return to institutions that had prevailed in the 19th-century Anglo-Saxon world. All the other major novel ideologies of the period -- mostly associated with the New Left: environmentalism, feminism, civil rights, anti-colonialism -- developed with almost no input from economics, though they did connect to some currents in sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. And by the 1990s even neoliberalism had transitioned from an insurgency into a consensus governing philosophy administered by a new technocratic class, one that was not much different from the liberal technocracy of the postwar period.

Tweet   @brothersjudd