Algorithmic economics: A plea for natural economic history

Matthias Klaes

No 003/2003, SCEME Working Papers: Advances in Economic Methodology from SCEME

Abstract: At first sight one might be tempted to regard Mirowski’s latest book primarily as a move away from the conceptual and metaphorical history of economics that one finds in More Heat than Light (Mirowski 1989, 'MHTL'), towards a historiography inspired by recent studies in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). But there is more to Machine Dreams (Mirowski 2002, MD) than meets the eye at first sight. The first two chapters of the book set up the main organising theme of the ensuing narrative. This theme centres on the concept of a 'cyborg.' Originally the result of merging 'cybernetic organism' into a single expression, this theme relates MD to an established science studies literature on 'cyborg science'. Mirowski establishes various strategies of how the discipline of economics reacted to what he calls the 'attack of the cyborgs'. What we are faced in MD are however two approaches to the history of economics, tightly interwoven with each other. On the one hand, MD is a sequel to MHTL. On the other hand though, we find that a significant amount of the research effort underpinning MD was spent not in the library but in the archive, trailing through memoranda, letters, drafts and other communication normally without the ambitions of the conceptual historian. While MHTL entertained anoccasional flirt with the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), in MD this has turned into a liaison dangereux, and an utterly compelling at that.

Keywords: Philip-Mirowski; Machine-Dreams; post-war-economics; SSK; conceptual-history (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2003-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sceme.org.uk/wps/SCEME003_KlaesM_AlgEcs_2003.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.sceme.org.uk:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sti:wpaper:003/2003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SCEME Working Papers: Advances in Economic Methodology from SCEME Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matthias Klaes ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).