Natural Images in Economic Thought

This collection of interdisciplinary essays is the first to investigate howimages in the history of the natural and physical sciences have beenused to shape the history of economic thought. The contributors,historians of science and economics alike, document the extent towhich scholars have drawn on physical and natural sciences to groundeconomic ideas, and evaluate the role and importance of metaphors inthe structure and content of economic thought. These range fromAristotle's discussion of the division of labor, to Marshall's evocation ofpopulation biology, to Hayek's dependence upon evolutionary con-cepts, and more recently to neoclassical economists' invocation ofchaos theory. Resort to such images, the contributors find, is morethan mere rhetorical flourish. Rather, appeals to natural and physicalmetaphors constitute the very subject matter of the discipline andwhat might be accepted as the "economic."

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Cambridge University Press978-0-521-44321-0 - Natural Images in Economic Thought: "Markets Read in Tooth and Claw"Edited by Philip MirowskiFrontmatterMore information

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Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics

Natural images in economic thought






Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics

General Editor: Professor Craufurd D. Goodwin, Duke University

This series contains original works that challenge and en-lighten historians of economics. For the profession as a wholeit promotes better understanding of the origin and content ofmodern economics.

Other books in the series:

William J. Barber: From New Era to New Deal: Herbert Hoover,the Economists, and American Economic Policy, 1921—1933

M. June Flanders: International Monetary Economics, 1870—1950

Lars Jonung (ed.): The Stockholm School of Economics RevisitedKyun Kim: Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory in Historical

PerspectiveGerald M. Koot: English Historical Economics, 1870-1926:

The Rise of Economic History and MercantilismDon Lavoie: Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist

Calculation Debate ReconsideredPhilip Mirowski: More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social

Physics, Physics as Nature's EconomicsMary S. Morgan: The History of Econometric IdeasTakashi Negishi: Economic Theories in a Non-Walrasian

TraditionMalcolm Rutherford: Institutions in Economics: The Old and

the New InstitutionalismKaren I. Vaughn: Austrian Economics in America: The

Migration of a TraditionE. Roy Weintraub: General Equilibrium Analysis: Studies in

AppraisalE. Roy Weintraub: Stabilizing Dynamics: Constructing Economic

Knowledge






Natural imagesin economic thought"Markets read in tooth and claw"

Edited byPHILIP MIROWSKIUniversity of Notre Dame

CAMBRIDGEUNIVERSITY PRESS






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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521443210

© Cambridge University Press 1994Reprinted 1996First paperback edition 2002

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First published 1994

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Library of Congress cataloguing in publication dataNatural images in economic thought : “markets read in tooth and claw”/ edited by Philip Mirowski. p. cm. – (Historical perspectives on modern economics)Papers presented at the Conference on Natural Images in Economics,University of Notre Dame, Sept. 1991.Includes index.ISBN 0–521–44321–0 – ISBN 0–521–47884–7 (pbk.)I. Economics – History – Congresses. I. Mirowski, Philip, 1951– .II. Conference on Natural Images in Economics (1991 : Universityof Notre Dame) III. Series.HB75.N39 1994330.1–dc20 93-41164 CIP

isbn 978-0-521-44321-0 Hardbackisbn 978-0-521-47884-7 Paperback

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Contents

List of contributors Page *x

Acknowledgments xiii

Part I The Natural and the Social

1 Doing what comes naturally: four metanarratives onwhat metaphors are for 3Philip Mirowski

2 So what's an economic metaphor? 20Arjo Klamer and Thomas C. Leonard

Part II Physical metaphors and mathematicalformalization

3 Newton and the social sciences, with special referenceto economics, or, the case of the missing paradigm 55/. Bernard Cohen

4 From virtual velocities to economic action: the veryslow arrivals of linear programming and locationalequilibrium 91Ivor Grattan-Guinness

5 Qualitative dynamics in economics and fluidmechanics: a comparison of recent applications 109Randall Bausor

6 Rigor and practicality: rival ideals of quantification innineteenth-century economics 128Theodore M. Porter






vi Contents

Part III Uneasy boundaries between man and machine

7 Economic man, economic machine: images ofcirculation in the Victorian money market 173Timothy L. Alborn

8 The moment of Richard Jennings: the production ofJevons's marginalist economic agent 197Michael V. White

9 Economics and evolution: Alfred James Lotka andthe economy of nature 231Sharon E. Kingsland

Part IV Organic metaphors and their stimuli

10 Fire, motion, and productivity: the proto-energeticsof nature and economy in Francois Quesnay 249Paul P. Christensen

11 Organism as a metaphor in German economicthought 289Michael Hutter

12 The greyhound and the mastiff: Darwinian themesin Mill and Marshall 322Margaret Schabas

13 Organization and the division of labor: biologicalmetaphors at work in Alfred Marshall's Principlesof Economics 336Camille Limoges and Claude Menard

14 The role of biological analogies in the theory ofthe firm 360Neil B. Niman

15 Does evolutionary theory give comfort or inspirationto economics? 384Alexander Rosenberg

16 Hayek, evolution, and spontaneous order 408Geoffrey M. Hodgson

Part V Negotiating over Nature

17 The realms of the Natural 451Philip Mirowski






Contents vii

18 The place of economics in the hierarchy of thesciences: Section F from Whewell to Edgeworth 484James P. Henderson

19 The kinds of order in society 536James Bernard Murphy

20 Feminist accounting theory as a critique of what's"natural" in economics 583David Chioni Moore

Index 611











Contributors

Timothy L. Alborn is Assistant Professor of History and Social Stud-ies at Harvard University. He works on the relation between scientificculture and the commercial professions in Victorian England.

Randall Bausor earned a Ph.D. in economics from Duke Universityand is now Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massa-chusetts at Amherst. His research concerns the formal modeling oftime in economics, the conceptual and philosophical foundations ofeconomic analysis, and the history of twentieth-century economics.

Paul P. Christensen is Assistant Professor of Economics at HofstraUniversity. His main area of research is the conceptual influences ofphysical and biological thought on classical economic theory. He haspublished articles on the influence of Harvey's physiology on the natu-ral philosophy and economics of Thomas Hobbes (History of PoliticalEconomy, 1989), on the role of energy availability in industrial transfor-mation and technological development, and on the development of anecological approach to economic production theory.

I. Bernard Cohen is Victor S. Thomas Professor (emeritus) of theHistory of Science, Harvard University. A past president of the Inter-national Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and of theHistory of Science Society, he is currently researching Newtonian sci-ence, the history of computing and information systems, and the inter-actions between the natural and the social sciences. In collaborationwith Anne Whitman, he has produced a new translation of Newton'sPrincipia, to be published in 1994 by the University of California Press.

Ivor Grattan-Guinness has both the doctorate (Ph.D.) and higherdoctorate (D.Sc.) in the History of Science from London University.He is currently Reader in Mathematics at Middlesex University, En-

ix






x Contributors

gland. He was editor of the history of science journal Annals of Sciencefrom 1974 to 1981 and founder-editor of the journal History and Phi-losophy of Logic from 1980 to 1992. He is a member of the AcademieInternationale d'Histoire des Sciences. His latest book is Convolutionsin French Mathematics, 1800-40, 3 vols. (Basel, 1990). He is editing theEncyclopaedia of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Sciences forBirkhauser and is also working on the history of mathematical logicand the foundations of mathematics from 1870 to 1930.

James P. Henderson is Professor of Economics at Valparaiso Univer-sity. He holds a Ph.D. degree in economics from Northern IllinoisUniversity. He is the Midwest Regional Director for the Associationfor Social Economics, is on the editorial board of the Review of SocialEconomics, and has served on the Executive Committee of the Historyof Economics Society. His research interests include William Whe-well's contributions to mathematical economics and the ethical andphilosophical foundations of Alfred Marshall's economic thought. Heis finishing a book on Whewell's economics for Rowman & Littlefield.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson is Lecturer in Economics at the Judge Instituteof Management Studies at the University of Cambridge. He has pub-lished widely in academicjournals and has written several books, includ-ing Economics and Evolution (Cambridge, 1993), After Marx and Sraffa(London, 1991), Economics and Institutions (Philadelphia, 1988), and TheDemocratic Economy (Harmondsworth, 1984). He is General Secretary ofthe European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy.

Michael Hutter has a Dr. rer. pol. from the University of Munich. Heis now Professor of Economics, Witten/Herdecke University. His re-search interests include cultural economics, monetary history andtheory, systems theory, and history of economic thought. He is authorof Die Produktion von Recht (Tubingen, 1989).

Sharon E. Kingsland is Professor of the History of Science at JohnsHopkins University. Her book, Modeling Nature (Chicago, 1985), is ahistory of the use of mathematical models in population ecology in themid-twentieth century. Her current research is on the history of biol-ogy in the United States, especially experimental studies of evolutionat the turn of the century.

Arjo Klamer is the author of Conversations with Economists (Totawa, NJ,1984), The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric (Cambridge, 1988, editedwith Robert Solow and Donald McCloskey), and The Making of anEconomist (Boulder, 1989, with David Colander). He is Associate Pro-fessor of Economics at George Washington University.






Contributors xi

Thomas C. Leonard is a graduate student in economics at GeorgeWashington University.

Camille Limoges is presently Director of the Research Center forthe Social Assessment of Technology (CREST) at the University ofQuebec at Montreal. He is the author of numerous studies on thehistory of biology. He is currently working on the dynamics of publictechnoscientific controversies and on the history of the developmentof automated instrumentation for biological research and for regula-tory purposes.

Claude Menard is Professor at the University of Quebec at Montrealand Director of the Centre d'Analyse Theorique des Organisations etdes Marches, Laboratoire de Microeconomie Appliquee, University ofParis. He is author of La formation d'une rationalite economique: A. A.Cournot (Paris, 1978).

Philip Mirowski is Carl Koch Chair of Economics and the Historyand Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He hasalso taught at the University of Amsterdam, Tufts, Yale, and the Uni-versity of Massachusetts. He is the author of Against Mechanism(Totawa, NJ, 1988) and More Heat Than Light (Cambridge, 1989) andthe editor of the forthcoming Ysidro Ycheued: Edgeworth on Chance,Economic Hazard and Statistics (Savage, MD). He is now at work on thehistory and theory of the constitution of error in quantitative measure-ment. "The Realms of the Natural," Chapter 17 of the present vol-ume, was his inaugural lecture for the Koch Chair.

David Chioni Moore, formerly a corporate banker with Citibank andCiticorp in New York, is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and CriticalTheory at Duke University, where he is writing a dissertation on post-colonial cultural theory in a supranational age. His recent work in-cludes "Accounting on Trial: The Critical Legal Studies Movementand Its Lessons for Radical Accounting" {Accounting, Organizations andSociety, 1991).

James Bernard Murphy received his Ph.D. in philosophy and politicalscience from Yale University in 1990. He is now Assistant Professor ofGovernment at Dartmouth College, where he teaches political theory.His chapter in this volume develops themes from his Moral Economy ofLabor (New Haven, CT, 1993).

Neil B. Niman is Associate Professor of Economics at the WhittemoreSchool of Business and Economics, University of New Hampshire.While maintaining a long-standing interest in the history of economic






xii Contributors

thought, he has focused primarily on organizational economics. Re-cent publications include "Biological Analogies in Marshall's Work"(Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 1991) and "The Entrepre-neurial Function in the Theory of the Firm" (Scottish Journal of PoliticalEconomy, 1991).

Theodore M. Porter is Associate Professor of History at the Universityof California, Los Angeles, and author of The Rise of Statistical Think-ing, 1820-1900 (Princeton, NJ, 1986). His recent work has been con-cerned mainly with the cultural and political resonances of objectivity.He is writing a book called The Quantification of Public Life.

Alexander Rosenberg is the author of six books on the philosophy ofsocial science, the philosophy of biology, and causation, includingmost recently Economics: Mathematical Politics or Science of DiminishingReturns'? (Chicago, 1992). He has held fellowships from the AmericanCouncil of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, andthe John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Rosenberg is Professor ofPhilosophy at the University of California, Riverside.

Margaret Schabas is Associate Professor of Philosophy at York Univer-sity, Toronto. She is the author of A World Ruled by Number (Princeton,NJ, 1990) and numerous articles. Her research examines concepts ofnature in classical political economy.

Michael V. White is Senior Lecturer in the Economics Department,Monash University, Clayton, Australia. His principal research is con-cerned with explaining the appearance of marginalist/neoclassical eco-nomics in the nineteenth century, focusing on the work of WilliamStanley Jevons. He is editing a forthcoming collection of Jevons's un-collected scientific writings.






Acknowledgments

The editor would like to thank the Carl Koch Endowment, the Pro-vost of Notre Dame, and Mike Loux, former dean of the College ofArts and Letters, for supporting the conference "Natural Images inEconomics" at the University of Notre Dame in September 1991. Thelogistics were ably arranged by Sylvia Phillips, without whom the en-tire project might have prematurely succumbed to entropic degrada-tion. The office of the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, andValues provided assistance, as did Wade Hands, Charles Craypo of theDepartment of Economics, and the staff at the Center for ContinuingEducation at Notre Dame. I would like to thank especially the numer-ous local faculty and invited guests who offered formal comments andinformal advice during the conference and would particularly like tosingle out Arjo Klamer and Avi Cohen for arranging an event not onthe printed schedule. Martin Stack provided research assistance andthe index for this volume. Last, but not least, I couldn't have done itwithout you, Pam.






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Natural Images in Economic Thought