How Economics Forgot History by Hodgson Geoffrey Martin

Author:Hodgson, Geoffrey Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

1 Much later, when Ayres (1958) claimed that his own ideas were a development of those of Veblen, he dismissed Veblen’s instinct theory as of little ultimate significance. Although Ayres was right to point out that Veblen failed to define instinct adequately, nevertheless, contrary to Ayres, instinct psychology remained foundational to Veblen’s position. See especially Veblen (1914).

2 Hobhouse was also a major influence on Hobson, who wrote a biography on his mentor with Ginsberg, Hobhouse’s successor at the LSE (Hobson and Ginsberg, 1932). Incidentally, Ginsberg (1932) went against the sociological trend of the time by attempting to retain some links between psychology, biology and sociology. He also maintained a notion of instinct in his analysis.

3 For a history of the department before the Second World War, see Mason and Lamont (1982).

4 The choice between Weber, Sombart and Marx must also be placed in the dramatic and global political context of the 1930s. Clearly, of the three, Weber was the closest to an American-style liberal. However, to make him one, his German nationalism and pessimistic views on progress would have to be overlooked (Hennis, 1988; Mommsen, 1984). Nevertheless, Zaret (1980, p. 1193) argued convincingly that Parsons’s ideological reaction against Marxism was significant and that ‘Parsons saw in Weber’s writings a non-Marxian foundation for general theory.’

5 In turn, and on this score, Henderson had been influenced by Whitehead, who was also at Harvard, and is widely regarded as a key inspiration in the development of systems theory (J. Miller, 1978).

6 To some considerable degree, however, the allegation was true of Ayres, who embraced behaviourist psychology and twice wrote – albeit with some qualification – that ‘there is no such thing as an individual’ (Ayres, 1918, p. 57; 1961, p. 175). Again we may point to the likelihood that Parsons’s understanding of Veblen’s thought was very much the questionable version that had been taught by Ayres. On some of the defects of Ayres’s interpretation of Veblen see Hodgson (1998e).

7 See Tilman (1992, pp. 170–4) for a discussion of some more of Parsons’s criticisms of Veblen, mainly from the postwar period.

8 As another example of Parsons’s idiosyncratic use of philosophical terminology, consider the term ‘emergence’. Although he used it, Parsons never clearly defined the concept. In a key passage in the Structure of Social Action where he came closest to a definition, he saw emergent properties as ‘a measure of the organicism of the system’ (Parsons, 1937a, p. 749). However, Parsons’s notion of emergence as a ‘measure’ has nothing to do with the concept as it is developed in the works of Whitehead, Lloyd Morgan, William McDougall and others. Their concept of emergence concerns the existence of properties of an entity at one ontological level, which are not reducible to or predictable from the lower-level properties of its components.

9 Note that Schumpeter (1954, pp. 15, 20–1, 819) endorsed a similar but not identical demarcation between the two disciplines. His definition of ‘economic theory’ or ‘economic analysis’ was narrow and similar to that of Robbins, consigning the ‘analysis of economic institutions’ to ‘economic sociology’.

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