ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: On the nature of economic laws: from A.Smith till A. Marshall
Author: Hardt Lukasz
Economics has been preoccupied for decades with explaining economic phenomena by subsuming them under economic laws. However, the meaning of these laws varied with the school of economic thought in which they were formulated. The goal of my paper is to investigate how economists from A. Smith till A. Marshall understood the very nature of economic laws. In particular, I focus on the issue of whether these laws were claimed to be general and universal or just context dependent. Henceforth, I start by presenting Smith’s arguments for and against universality of economic laws. I attempt at reconciling Smith’s different views on these laws. Next, I switch to D. Ricardo and try to comprehend his understanding of economic laws. Here, similarly to Smith, Ricardo’s view on economic laws is that these laws are true in models producing them but once confronted with empirical phenomena they are statements of what may happen in the real world, i.e., they have the status of beliefs. In the next step, I present some insights into the way J.S. Mill comprehend economic laws. Here, for instance, I raise the question of whether Mill’s tendency laws can be modified once contrasted with particular phenomena. Finally, I compare these classical economists’ views on laws with the ones of A. Marshall. What my paper shows is that all these economists’ opinions on the nature of laws were in-between treating these laws as nearly universal regularities and considering them only as statements of what might happen in given circumstances. However, I show these views to be complementary ones by applying the methodological strategy which refers, among others, to Debreu’s distinction between “the theory in the strict sense” and “the informal discussion of interpretations [of the theory]”. Henceforth, the paper attempts at offering a metamethodology of how different views on economic laws in the works of the above mentioned authors can be reconcile.
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