Political economy and the social disciplines: the modern life of Das Adam Smith Problem

William Dixon and David Wilson

Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2014, vol. 38, issue 3, 623-641

Abstract: The standard vision of the self in economics has been backdated onto a misrepresented Adam Smith but has more in common with the egoistic vision of Thomas Hobbes. This self, given its narrowness, has provoked criticism concerning its adequacy for explaining social, historical and psychological phenomena. The latter are then addressed within a framework that reproduces their Hobbesian origin by ceding a territory of self-interest, rational choice, to economics and so looks to disciplinary proliferation to cover the areas left aside. In this manner we shall show an anti-Whig history as much constrained by its origins as what it contests. Both sides have reproduced uncritically the framework of Das Adam Smith Problem. Here we investigate how developments of sociology, social history, socio-economics and economic psychology have not been able to exit from the terms of that problem.

Date: 2014
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