History of Economics Playground

You can call it scandalous; you can call it Mickey Mouse; you can even call it fried chicken, if you want. But the session titled “From History of Economics to Histories about Economics” at the last HES meeting in Denver was just a thrilling experience. Let me explain in a few words what its purpose was. The last few years have witnessed the development of a literature about the history of economics outside of our field. Historians of science, economic historians and journalists (among others) have begun to write about the same issues we are (supposed to be) interested in and most of the time, they do not quote historians of economics. How did it happen? It is very simple, actually, and could be summed up in Stanley Fish’s terms: 1) Do your job, 2) Don’t try to do someone else’s job, 3) Don’t let anyone else do your job. Historians of economics have tried to act as economists, using the past to build alternative economic models or criticizing mainstream economics on its own terms. By doing so, they have created a “What If” History of Economics, one that builds parallel stories that can be understood only within the community, but offers virtually no insight on its recent developments, its status as a science or its cultural influence. On the other hand, you have another kind of accounts, such as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. They provide a more caricatural view of the economist as a torturer, mass-murderer and conspirator. Historians of economics may find them shocking (that’s the word, indeed), misinformed, misleading and dangerous, but those accounts have a significant appeal beyond our small community, and by refusing to address them in some ways, considering them as popular rubbish, we choose to remain in self-referentiality.

During this session, Loïc Charles, Harro Maas and Tiago Mata presented a perspective on the future developments of our field, not by restating previous positions, but by looking at possible new ways of doing the history of economics. Looking at recent developments in other fields such as history of science, economic history and political science, Loïc observed that non-disciplinary histories of economics are currently being written, offering a new intellectual space of trade between these various communities. Harro, by resorting to the metaphor of the historian as a curator, showed that we can build new narratives on the history of economics if we try to go beyond the text, arranging economics as a series of objects. For someone like me who studies the place of visual representation in economics, this metaphor has a strong appeal. I look at the large amount of visual materials I collected over the years (books, digital pictures and scans) and realize I use them in a very conservative way in comparison to the vast possibilities that are open if I think of them as pieces of art which would have to be curated in an exhibition. Would it provide a different kind of history? Last but not least, Tiago used Fish’s concept of interpretive communities to construct a picture of the public imagination of economics in recent works, without distinction between works intended for an audience of specialists and those intended for a larger audience. In Tiago’s account, indeed, there is no “audience” understood as this abstract mass of people out there, there are only anonymous individuals, internet users and bloggers, all contributing to create some understanding of economics.

I would not assert that these papers are perfect. They were intended for discussion rather than for immediate publication and I should say that the presentation itself seemed to me better than the actual papers. The presentation, actually, was quite spectacular. It had a kind of restrained violence toward the audience – the violence became less retrained during Tiago’s presentation when spectators were exposed to Klein’s striking rhetorics by way of graphic images – and the tension was palpable. In the same way art history has gradually given way to visual studies and visual culture, these papers may be viewed as an attempt to get rid of the “old” history of economics and to replace it by “economics studies” or “economic culture”. This is not a mere question of wording, it is a deeper transformation of our field. The skepticism of many attendants, explicit or implicit, makes sense.

Reading some of the comments on a previous post of this blog, I can’t escape thinking that there still exists, even among the members of our community – by “our” community, I don’t mean historians of economics in general, but more narrowly, postmodern and SSK-inflected historians of economics (whatever that is) -, some misunderstandings related to what postmodern thought is, to its influence on the history of science and on SSK. Words such as “postmodernism” and “relativisn” can be used in a quite loose – and sometimes harmful – way. I will not pretend here that I have more knowledge than anyone on that matter, but I know at least one person who does: Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Professor Smith has been trained in psychology, literary criticism and cultural theory and those who haven’t read my review of Stanley Fish’s Save the World on your Own Time, will surely wonder what literary criticism has to offer to those who study the history of economics. The answer is: a lot, actually.

In her last book, Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human (2005), Smith elucidates, in less than 200 pages, some of the questions we are asking ourselves on this blog, with unequaled accuracy, thoughtfulness and what I would call a jubilatory bent for intellectual jousting. This is hardly Smith’s first endeavour in the field of the History and Philosophy of Science. Her previous book, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (1997) dealt with the same kind of material. Though she proudly acknowledges she is no philosopher, nor is she a social scientist, Smith is a fine reader of science. It is no secret that she is herself a radical relativist/constructivist but the power of her analysis comes from her ability not only to criticize, but also to understand the point of view of those who try to beat postmodernism. She can literally strip her opponents’s arguments to the bone, as to reveal how empty and meaningless they are. If you intend to contradict her, then, choose your words carefully! I will not detail the book chapter after chapter as I did for Fish’s essay, but I will try to give you a hint of a material that certainly repays study.

The general objective of the book is to revisit two decades of science wars and to review all the harms that have been made on contemporary cultural theory and behavioral sciences, tracking the last bits of anti-relativism and positivist philosophy in newspapers articles, feminist writings and recent works in evolutionary psychology. The author does not think that all people criticizing postmodernism are idiots. In her opinion, indeed, most of them are doing interesting – if not fascinating – things but they are also misled by unjustified preconceptions on constructivism. To contradict these authors, Smiths appeals to what she calls pre-postmodern relativists such as Ludwig Fleck and Carl Becker.

The meaning of the title is dual: it refers both to the fact it is often said that “knowledge, or the problem of knowledge, is the scandal of philosophy” (1) and to all the scandalized critiques of postmodernism, which assert that the latter is a threat against the highest values of our society: the ability of making moral and aesthetic judgements, the possibility of scientific progress and nothing less that the pillars of Western democracy. Smith’s response to that critique is that in fact, relativism is an attack against one and only one thing, traditional (i.e. positivist and judgemental) philosophy. But, as Smith observes: “[w]hile it is not clear that the scandal matters to anyone but philosophers, philosophers point out that it should matter to everyone … [f]or, they explain, unless we can ground our claims to knowledge as such, which is to say distinguish it from mere opinion, superstition, fantasy, wishful thinking, ideology, illusion or delusion, then the actions we take on the basis of presumed knowledge – boarding an airplane, swallowing a pill, finding someone guilty of a crime – will be irrational and unjustifiable” (ibid.).

This is a rather serious claim. In chapter 2, Smith illustrates some examples of the implications of it in recent controversies, examining Deborah Lindstadt’s thesis that postmodern theory is responsible for the rise of Holocaust denial (a thesis that has been given credit by other academics and journalists) and Edward Rothstein’s contention that the same stream of skepticism has been discredited by 9/11. She observes that such sets of linkages are generally based on no actual quotation from postmodern thinkers. “Who among the figures commonly associated, properly or improperly, with ‘postmodern’ theory maintains that all truth is subjective or that one man’s narrative is as good as another’s? Michel Foucault? Jacques Derrida? Jean-François Lyotard? Hayden White? Richard Rorty? Stanley Fish? David Bloor? Bruno Latour? Actually, of course, none of these” (20). The real problem, she suggests, is that those who support such misleading conclusions often do so because they want to sustain values that they consider beyond scrutiny: “A denunciation of relativism amounts to a demand for dogmatism – for predetermined judgement armoured against new thought” (23).

Smith also points out that many disparaging commentaries on relativism are made by people who often happen to be relativist in the sense actual relativists define it (she illustrates this paradox by quoting from feminist theorician Donna Haraway and from … Proust !). She shows that debates similar to those who appeared at the end of the twentieth also occurred in the 1920s and in the 1930s as Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf or Pablo Picasso were often linked to the more perilous evil of those times: Bolshevism. In fact, she observes, there existed an important stream of pre-postmodern relativism, represented by people like John Dewey or Margaret Mead, during a period “marked by a confident positivism in the natural sciences and a related scientism in much academic philosophy”. Those original thoughts were mostly swept away by decades of “popular beliefs and cultural associations that made-up the Cold War; the global eruption of various radical social movements … ; and throughout the century, dramatic technological developments and widespread demographic shifts” (31). All those events fostered in the same way social conservatism and a “renewed … commitment to the idea and ideals of objectivity” (32).

Related to this historical context is Smith’s account of Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, published in 1935. Fleck’s book was overshadowed by a more popular one, Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, published the same year. Fleck was rediscovered and praised by Kuhn and later by Latour (whose Pasteurization of France, Smith argues, is in some way a reinvention of Genesis and Development). Yet it is no surprise, given the peculiar intellectual environment of the early postwar period that Fleck was ignored and that scientists, in search of legitimacy, preferred the demarcating epistemology offered by Popper. In addition, Fleck was a Polish Jew whose work in chemistry did not draw the attention of Western scientists. He was arrested during the war and sent to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Nonetheless, he survived the war and emigrated to Israel, where he died in 1961. His conceptions in Genesis and Development were influenced by his practice of chemistry. The book tells the development of the Wassermann reaction, a chemical process that allowed for the detection of the syphilis pathogen. Fleck shows that the Wassermann reaction occured within the development of various beliefs, techniques, theories, methods, political and professional interests (yes, it sounds a lot like SSK !). The following passage, quoted by Smith (57), shows how radical Fleck’s relativism was:

It is true that modern doctrine is supported by much more sophisticated techniques of investigation, much broader experience, and more thorough theory. The naive analogy between the organs of both sexes has disappeared and far more details are at our disposal. But the path from dissection to formulated theory [and pictorial representation] is extremely complicated, indirect and culturally conditioned … In science, just as in art and in life, only that which is true to culture is true to nature.

In addition, Smith shows that Fleck also provided the demonstration that his conceptions of science had nothing to do with the idea that all theories are equally valid because the latter is actually the opposite of the assertion that “the validity of a theory depends on its position in a network of historically specific connections” (64). Smith observes that this justification is similar to Latour’s distinction between relative and absolute relativism.

I will not try to detail the rest of the book. Smith’s wordings are too precise and subtle to withstand summarization. Trying to reconstruct her thought would result in unproductive paraphrase. Nonetheless, I can’t finish this review without saying a few words on Chapter 6, devoted to Evolutionary Psychology. In this chapter, she addresses the claims of contemporary evolutionary psychology, whose most notable advocate is Steven Pinker. She shows that contrary to what evolutionary psychologists assert, the alternative to the claim that all human behavior – “from incest avoidance and female-adolescent anorexia to past-tense formation and a taste for Victorian novels” (130) – can be explained by our genes, is not dogmatic theology or ideologically driven humanities, but a set of more sophisticated models of development, such as those theorized by Susan Oyama in her book The Ontogeny of Information, giving rise to developmental or ecological psychology. Evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker operate within a mechanical conception of the brain, in which the latter is considered as an information processing computer. This conception rejects – or ignore – major works in biology which explain human behavior in terms of  interactions between cells and their environment (involving “complex social and perceptual coordination”, as well as “internal feedback mechanisms”). The relation between those issues and what has been studied earlier in the book is that evolutionary psychologists often strengthen their claims by discrediting alternative theories as dubious – if not dangerous – postmodernism. Frequently, those claims mistake constructivism for social constructivism (or social constructionism): they identify the claims of alternative theories as the idea that everything is socially/culturally constructed, whereas these theories  simply claim that there is no clear separation between nature and nurture. These distinctions are particularly rich and subtle and one is not even obliged to share Smith’s skepticism to examine them carefully. Those interested in the relations between economics and biology might want to give special attention to these debates.

In her course on “Biological Issues in Cultural Theory” at Duke University, Barbara Herrnstein Smith teaches graduate students in philosophy, theology and natural sciences that Bruno Latour has been the most important theorist over the last twenty-five years. If only to hear that once in my life, I think I have been fortunate to sit in on her class. I hope I have conveyed the pleasures one feels reading her writings, that his, the pleasures of being scandalized.

It has some sprinkles of Cold War and hints that models of networking information competed, yet, it feels so “whiggish.” It is a shame that not all nerds are angels.

Vanessa Bell, The Memoir Club (1943)

Hazy concepts can produce some enjoyable reading.

Evidence of that has been furnished by the recent conference on “Creative Communities”, which has been held at Duke on saturday, november 1st. I understand that the conference itself was an emanation of the HES list, following a question asked by Evelyn Forget in April 2008. Attendees were among those who answered Evelyn’s initial question. Those were the usual suspects working on some other usual suspects: Robert Leonard on The Vienna Circle, Ross Emmett on the Chicago School, Loic Charles on Quesnay’s circles and Craufurd Goodwin on the Bloomsbury group. Bruce Larson provided the opening speech and Evelyn Forget presented a paper on the US economists doing economic policy at the Office of Economic Opportunities in the 1960s. That episode, which is not well known among economists and historians, seems very interesting to me, because it is my feeling that the history of economics as it has been done until now has on the whole ignored the importance of economic policy and more generally of the work that has been done by social workers, statisticians, propagandists, journalists and bureaucrats at the crossroads of creation and diffusion of economic knowledge.

The other contributions were similarly interesting and produced many thoughtful comments from the audience. I particularly enjoyed Ross Emmett’s article on the Chicago School of economics, and its emphasis on the worshop, the seminar organized by the Chicagoans to train their graduate students and spread the Price Theory to the rest of the academics – involving some painful paper bashing from senior Chicago professors toward their students and guest lecturers.

Yet I have to confess that, while I learned a lot from individual contributions, I did not learn as much about the whole idea of “Creative Community”, a term that does not make much sense to me. What is the difference between a “Creative Community” and a “Collaborative Circle”? As Roy Weintraub suggested during the conference, it is even doubtful that the term “creativity” is of any interest as a historical concept. It results from this that the real contribution of the conference was elsewhere. Actually, it showed that good articles are easily obtained when the emphasis is placed on social relations in the process of creation and diffusion of (scientific) knowledge rather than on individual contributions or on the text itself. Said in other terms, good contributions to the history of economics require at least some understanding of the context. Though it would be rather easy to say that we already knew that, as historians of science have done such work for decades, I will simply say that I was delighted to see how the discussion turned naturally to the questions that interest me the most. Should we use the word “schools”? How collaborations occur? How one’s personality toward his friends and collaborators affect the work that is done? Are we focused too much on the output of scientific research and not enough on the process itself?

For this reason, I don’t think that the output of the conference should be a specific issue or a mini-symposium in a HET journal. If those contributions were to be fully developed and joined by some others, I would rather see a kind of SSK Reader following from this. But my wish might be at odds with the feelings and expectations of the other participants.

Deservingly, Social Studies of Science is the top journal in History and Philosophy of Science in Web of Science’s Journal Citation Reports (Social Science edition, impact factor 1.651 in 2007). It is the journal of the 4S (The Society for Social Studies of Science) — the “S pun” goes as high as 6, with the Society for Social Studies of Science Student Section.

The journal’s latest call for papers is on the subject of “Privatizing Science: new commercial ways of knowing.” It reads:

The authors of these studies tend to polarize into what Mirowski has called the Economic Whigs – promoting technology transfer and public/private partnerships – and the Mertonian Tories – sounding the alarm bell to protect the norms of science while preaching a return to the supposed Mertonian Golden Age.

That’s right, Mirowski. The editors of the special issue will be Rebecca Lave (Indiana University), Samuel Randalls (University College London) and Philip Mirowski (Notre Dame).

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the enfant terrible of the history of economics became the gatekeeper of the economics of knowledge?

P.S. In the video Hayek turns up at 6:32, Phil at 8:40.

This question pops up in my mind while reading an article in which the author, Frances Woolley, assesses the impact of Feminist economics on the economic profession after 10 years (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a727695227~db=all~order=page).

According to the abstract: “This article provides a partial assessment through a consideration of citations of the journal Feminist Economics, describing its impact on mainstream economics, heterodox economics, and other disciplines.”

What I find interesting is the conclusion that, measured through citations of the journal in other economic journals, the impact of feminist economics has been marginal on the economic profession as a whole. On the other hand, I think that few would contest the fact that feminist economics has established itself as an emerging sub-discipline in the last 10 years. The explanation of this apparent paradox is that a few individuals deeply committed to the feminist economics research program (for example, most of them are or have been in the editing commitee of Feminist economics) were able to attract enough attention and interest to launch and sustain it. In this regard, one may say that it took very little to create a new sub-discipline.

One issue raised by the article is the fact that, since most of the works devoted to history of successful and unsuccessful economic sub-disciplines have insisted on the content rather than on the context, we know very little on the institutional process that leads a research program to emulate a new sub-discipline. It is a shame since, in the present situation of the history of economics, this kind of knowledge could be quite useful to better undestand our options and our likely institutional future if any…

Post-Scriptum: Frances Woolley’s article has prompted an interesting comment by Fred Lee in a later issue of the same journal (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a788401976~db=all~order=page), who argued that Feminist economics was not so much a new sub-discipline but a specific research program integrated in an existing sub-discipline (heterodox economics).

The boat had an engine so it wasn’t sailing. Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins explain:

“Collins then at Southampton University, was organizing the so-called Southampton Peace Workshop which took place in July 1997. Sokal was unable to come but the participants included Labinger, Mermin, and Pinch as well as several other scholars representing diverse fields: physics, history of science, literary theory. For two days, one of which was spent cruising round Southampton water in a small motorboat, the eight conferees were closeted together for intense discussions” (p.x)

It was watersports for peace and it worked. Labinger and Collins’s book seemingly proclaimed an armistice in the Science Wars. But there was still Alan Sokal, the hoaxman who had missed the boat trip. Refusing the terms of the settlement Sokal has a new book replaying the mid-1990s and his hysterical defense of science. David Mermin reviews it for Nature with commendable good sense and taste, calling the book a “small step backwards.”

I cannot be so contained. My suggestion is to throw Sokal in the water.

Truth

3. a. Faith, trust, confidence. (Cf. TROTH 3a.) Obs.
b. Belief; a formula of belief, a creed. (Cf. TROTH 3b.) Obs.

If the Oxford English Dictionary says so, who am I to disagree. Scientific communities arrive at “truthiness” through social negotiation. It is not consensus. Battles for credibility and some empire building decide who is silenced and who is conferred authority. We get winners and losers. We get convention and we get dissent. Communities reconfigure alongside the intellectual controversy, some will go in and some out, some distant and some close.

Do we have truth in the history of economics? We have a few programs that promise to interpret the historical record in a single sweep, such as the Graz-Rome and the Notre Dame-Nijmegen. But it seems unlikely that any of them will succeed in shaping our community. Instead we are fragmented in little specialties, experts on some authors, periods, or themes, which mostly do not communicate. Beatrice and I will share a desire for a more encompassing history of economics, less feudal. In her suggestion that we “find THE four histories of such and such event,” I read openness to have many historians piecing the mosaic of their work to compose a broader and more complex view of the past.

As I enter the house of mirrors, I am expected to apply my understanding of scientific communities to my own. So I should be calling for truth, to distinguish convention and dissent and regulate insiders and outsiders. But gazing at my disformed reflexivity, I am not sure this image I see is me. For me what makes a good history is not its explanation of how WE got here. Good history is not the history of the big white men and the “important.” I suggest that our truth lies not in THE narrative but in the ways we write them. Any “THE four histories of such and such” will exclude the n-4 histories of such and such. I feel committed to defend the historical record of that destruction. Volumes and volumes are still being written on the French revolution, not because we are still looking for THE histories, but because we indulge in changing the questions and always finding in that record something fresh.

With aimless curiosity we should reshape our community.

As a way to provide a different perspective on some the discussions we have entertained these last few weeks on the blog, it would probably be worthwhile to have a look at the last issue of Isis, where the focus is on: “What is the Value of History of Science?”

Some of the articles, such as “Does Science Education Need the History of Science?” or “How Can History of Science Matter to Scientists?” seems (I did not read them yet) particularly relevant to our concerns.

The controversy over the New Yorker cover is an interesting case study of how culture reads culture. The critics of the cover object to the representation of Barack and Michelle as extremists of Black Power and Islam. The association is a falsehood, although one that some news media will sometimes insinuate to feed punditry. The trouble is that the medium of the representation was not the news media with its normative claim to objectivity. It was what the New Yorker calls a cartoon.

Since there is a wide range of visuals that fall under the heading of cartoon, we are steeped in murky semiotic waters. The critics and the supporters of the cover distributed themselves into two camps. The critics called the cartoon a caricature. The supporters called the cartoon a satire. Hence the debate turned ontological: an agreement ought to be reached on what the thing is. A caricature purports to enhance certain aspects of reality, and by bringing the hidden into focus, it can claim a measure of objectivity. A satire serves not the purpose of truth and faithful representation, it seeks the absurd by bringing an argument to its excessive conclusions.

The controversy about the cover is no longer about the cover. The new subject is the legitimate social sphere of satire. Fine and dandy to have New Yorker magazines delivered in the mailbox of the intellectual classes (like me, who have yet to receive this issue, and losing hope of ever getting such an incendiary item). Not so nice to have New Yorker magazines in newsstands since the public is ignorant of subtlety and will subscribe to whatever meets their eyes.

This was the title of one of the plenary session held in the 2008 HES conference. At the bar were: Esther-Mariam Sent who explains that lots historians of economics hate SSK and that it was neither nice nor very clever. Tim Leonard who said something but I can not remember what exactly. Ivan Moscati who talks about his disbelief in SSK and that it was being clever to do history of economic analysis and heterodox economics. Ross Emmet who made a case for the linguistic turn. Steve Medema who said that as an editor as well as a human being he believed in diversity in opinions. Although I am simplifying a lot (which is not nice for the participants), one could grasp that I was not impressed by the general tone of the interventions – as well as by most of the remarks made by the public. And because this post was inspired by a lunch discussion I had just after the session with Pedro and Floris, I would use Q&A to explain my point of view.

Why? Simply because I think that the real issue was not really put on the table.

What is the real issue, then? Historicity.

What do you mean by that? The bare fact that as an historian of economics, I am convinced that what is really important when speaking of my working method is history, not economics or social science.

What do you mean by that (again)? I mean that as an historian of economics, I am constructing historical narratives and that to construct (what I believe) meaningful narratives I sometime refer to the social constraints that exist on the actors of science/economics (social class, culture, etc.) and other times I believe that it is necessary to refer the theoretical discussions the scientists actually had and take for granted that it is what matters. In other words, as an historian of economics I do not love nor hate social studies of science or economic analysis, there are tools that I find sometimes useful and at other times irrelevant. When they are useful I certainly like them, but when I believe them not pertinent in my narrative, I dislike them.

So I suppose that you believed that this session was not pertinent? Exactly. I would go even further, I believe it was to some extent counter-productive. When listening to the interventions, I felt that most of us were simply recreating an old and uninstering debate about what is more important in the development of economics: the internal (history of economic analysis) of the external (SSK) factors? Let me ask you something: when you are writing a paper on the history of economic analysis, do you sincerely believe that your hand is guided only by your social/cultural background?

No I don’t. OK, now, on the other hand, don’t you believe that this social/cultural background of you has no bearing on the topics you have chosen or the perspective in which you consider them?

Yes I do. You have said all that there is to it, young blood.

You are right, let’s go do some papers of HISTORY of economics now, because this is what I need to get me a (good) position.

Biotechnologies reshape our relation to “nature”. All sorts of living organisms are engineered and marketed, it is now almost trivial even to remark it. Yet, I am still struck when I meet the most banal form of genetically modified organisms. As the linked page shows, it is not just about a model-organism: the JAX laboratory highlights the “key features” of the commodity, informs you of its availability, provides technical support, all with a price tag. With sales in July?

The economic logic is so much intertwined with the biological material that I feel that the story of the commodification of living organisms, well studied in the history of biology (eg, here or here), might find a place in the history of economics as well.

When scientists explore new areas language is vivid, sparkling, different. Take Laboratory Life. It lures historians and philosophers of science into a new direction, but above all joyfully plays with ‘order’ and ‘disorder’, with ‘scientist’ and ‘observer.’ As much as it is science it is art: history of science can be a novel of life. But then fields grow older, the analytics get in and all prose and poetry is rigorously slashed until nothing but a formal skeleton remains. The recently published Handbook of Science and Technology Studies is such a book. Science studies has matured. Where enchanted children drew sketchy impression of that magnificent world now grumpy old publish-or-perishers formalize and classify a depressing world in endless reiteration. I protest.

It is time for a romantic turn in history and philosophy of science. Science is tantalizing, impossibly incomprehensible and beautiful. Let us no longer formalize what cannot be formalized or dissect what should be regarded in its entirety. Let us seek to express science and scientists. Let us not understand, but experience.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “dissemination” as:

“The action of scattering or spreading abroad seed, or anything likened to it; the fact or condition of being thus diffused; dispersion, diffusion, promulgation.”

A conference jointly run by the European and Japanese societies for the History of Economic Thought, borrows the term for the “Dissemination of Economic Ideas”:

The conference aims at
- investigating how economic ideas developed and spread across national borders (within Europe, Asia, and the US);
- studying the implications of the novel ideas with respect to the ways in which certain economic and social problems were perceived;
- investigating the policies that were derived from the new perspectives assumed and tools adopted;
- studying the impact of the new ideas on the formation of institutions;
- elaborating these aspects in particular with regard to the age of enlightenment, historicism and the interwar period.

The farming metaphor suggests even some: “cross-breeding taking place right now” between Japanese and Western economics.

I don’t want to claim that a call for papers should be a model of precision. Still, I will take these statements to uncharitably interrogate this model of communication of ideas.

Who does what in a dissemination? If there is a planting of the idea-seed, who is the farmer and what is his gain in the harvest? If there is no farmer, then there must be a wind carrying the idea-seed over Persia, the mountains, the deserts, the plains of Asia, and across the sea to Japan. The aerial seed-idea makes root nowhere else but Japan. So what about soil characteristics?

“Dissemination” raises many questions but I am not sure they are the right ones. Surely, the questions should be taking us to consider the agency of these processes, the interests of the involved, their interactions, political, and cultural conflicts. Instead, we are directed toward the seed-idea, as if of itself it could tell us something.

Lot long ago, natural scientists saw social theory critics as dangerous subversives, undermining science authority. The armistice was first settled in the UK. Social scientists were invited to cooperate with government and big science to engage a suspicious public. The exemplar was Labour’s risky GM Nation Debate.

The cooperative seems productive. At Harvard, Sheila Jasanoff set up a Science and Democracy Network, to examine the dialogue between experts and publics. The first academic output is Designs on Nature. But the impact of the effort is best assessed by scientists’ willingness to replace the words “truth” and “objectivity” with such social mush as “trust,” “persuasion” and “morality.”