NDLI: Economics invents the economy: Mathematics, statistics, and models in the work of Irving Fisher and Wesley Mitchell

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Breslau, Daniel
Copyright Year	2003
Abstract	The “embeddedness” of economic life in social relations has become a productive analytical principle and the basis of a penetrating critique of economic orthodoxy. But this critique raises another important, social and historical question, of how the economy became “disembedded” in the first place – how the multitude of transactions designated (somewhat arbitrarily) as economic were abstracted from the rest of social life and reconstituted as an object, the economy, which behaves according to its own logic. This article investigates the social sources of some innovations in economic thought that contributed to the emergence of the economy, particularly statistical indicators and mechanical models. By examining the redefinitions of the object of economic research developed by Irving Fisher and Wesley Mitchell in the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century, I argue that the abstraction of the economy from the remainder of social life was a strategy linked to the position of these innovators within the field of economics, conceived as a social structure. Possessing a specialized scientific cultural capital, but lacking upper class background, contacts, and dispositions that characterized the founders of academic economics, Fisher and Mitchell elaborated new definitions of their discipline's object of study, and a new type of economic expertise.
Starting Page	379
Ending Page	411
Page Count	33
File Format	PDF
ISSN	03042421
Journal	Theory and Society
Volume Number	32
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	15737853
Language	English
Publisher	Kluwer Academic Publishers
Publisher Date	2003-01-01
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Philosophy of the Social Sciences Sociology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Sociology and Political Science History

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