ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The convoluted influence of Robbins’s thinking in the emergence of Economics imperialism
Author: Falgueras-Sorauren Ignacio
From the second half of the last century up to now, economists have experienced an increased interest in studying topics that were previously considered to be intrinsically non-economic and so inaccessible to them — see Ierulli and Tommasi (1995, 1). As a consequence, an increasingly body of research has appeared whose topics range over issues such as the family, suicide, religion, politics, law, biology, etc. This relentless expansion of the economic science into other areas of knowledge has been known as economic imperialism. Looking at this academic phenomenon with intellectual curiosity, (at least) one obvious question comes up to one’s mind: what prompted economists to change their minds about the questions they could address with their science? Whenever one investigates this issue in the literature a recurrent answer is suggested which — either in an explicit or an implicit way — traces back the roots of this conception of economics to Robbins’ Essay on the Nature and significance of Economic Science (hereafter Essay) and the definition of the science it contains— e.g. Khalil (1996: 17) who writes: “Robbins’s definition of economics came to provide the backbone to the argument of the universality of economics”. Hence, the image that Robbins’s definition directly promoted this imperialistic expansion of the science — and, consequently, that he shared the confidence in the unlimited power or economic method which is typical of this research programme — has been formed and accepted within Economics. My paper partially challenges this conclusion and shows that Robbins’s influence on the emergence of this intellectual movement is more intricate. To this end, it begins by analysing some texts by Robbins which have passed unnoticed up to the moment and where the author explicitly expresses his disbelief in the omnipotence of the economic method. After this — and taking advantage of previous research which shows that there is a confusion in Robbins between the subject-matter and the method of the science — the paper shows that it is this confusion which led Robbins to put empirical content to what actually are theoretical assumptions introduced to facilitate the analysis. Finally, the paper will analyse the consequences of this confusion: the economist reads an empirical content in his analytical tools, which makes him believe that each time he formulates a theoretical (formal) problem he is capturing the economic dimension of an empirical problem. As a consequence, the impression that real economic problems are being analysed by simply postulating a formal problem is gained, which favours the view that economic analysis can be applied without limits. Hence, a more accurate view of the influence of Robbins’s work on the subsequent development of the science emerges from this analysis: though he didn’t believe in the unlimited power of economic reasoning — as economic imperialists do — and therefore he should not be counted as a direct founder of economic imperialism, he indirectly paved the way to this intellectual movement through the confusions that are implicit in his thought.
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