The Biographical Turn: Lives in history by Hans Renders & Binne de Haan & Jonne Harmsma

Author:Hans Renders & Binne de Haan & Jonne Harmsma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Economics has time and again been portrayed as a value-neutral science, with economists being advocates of neutral insights whose role remains ‘pristine and untainted by ideology’.58 Increasingly, however, the intrinsic normativity of the young discipline has been uncovered, and economics is now even branded a ‘religion’.59 In its political manifestation, that is, through the work and ideas of political economists and experts, the biographical approach fruitfully contributes to the singularisation of economics by highlighting the personal visions of economy and worldview that form the foundation of the interplay between economics and politics. While periods of dominant styles and modes of thinking abound – from the Keynesian consensus in the 1960s to the neoliberal ascendency of recent decades – it is individual economists, expert politicians and advisors, rather than schools of thinking, who act to influence science, politics and society.60 The biographical perspective makes visible their unique visions and thereby undermines ‘the “scientific” status of economics’, to show that the supposed abstract uniformity of schools does not exist.61

Acknowledging this normative and ideological underpinning of economics and expertise, psychologist John Jost has argued that ‘ideology is everywhere’ and that there was never ‘a truly nonideological era’ in politics.62 Jost’s conclusion can wholeheartedly be supported, albeit only to a certain extent. Economic thinking has indeed never been devoid of ideology, and there can be no neutral or ‘honest’ politics. Nevertheless, while we today pierce the purported neutrality and objectivity of economic expertise, and Jost declares ‘the end of the end of ideology’, we should acknowledge that the inherently normative basis of expertise has long remained unnoticed. The economic expert in fact acted as a political outsider and built a reputation for scientific impartiality. Zijlstra’s ‘honest politics’ and the objectivity of expertise are concepts, therefore, requiring further interpretation as historical instances of political style and substance. The end of ideology and the rise of expert politics were – and to a significant degree still are – a historical reality to be understood. The 1950s and 1960s were an era of technocratic expertise in which economic issues became a neutral tertium, detached from politics, Parliament and the voters, the exclusive domain of expert-politicians.

‘Style is substance’, and as a political style, the supposed neutrality, honesty and objectivity of expertise is ‘fraught with meaning’.63 The political style of Zijlstra, for instance, was based on the pragmatism of a detached expert and his distinctly personal vision of an economic world. Finding middle ground between Keynes’s ideas and more classical economic concepts in the 1940s and 1950s, Zijlstra’s views were politically and scientifically palatable for many. From the 1960s onwards he moved away from the Keynesian ‘faith’ to become a ‘moderate monetarist’, as he contended.64 To grasp the meaning of this abstract notion, however, it is necessary to take a ‘biographical turn’ and investigate the intrinsically personal, unique constellation of his thinking.

This biographical perspective makes it possible to explore the expert’s alleged objectivity and neutrality and uncover the singularity of various forms of economic thinking. The core of economic

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