Philip Mirowski

The ArgumentIn the minds of many, the Bourbakist trend in mathematics was characterized by pursuit of rigor to the detriment of concern for applications or didactic concessions to the nonmathematician, which would seem to render the concept of a Bourbakist incursion into a field of applied mathematices an oxymoron. We argue that such a conjuncture did in fact happen in postwar mathematical economics, and describe the career of Gérard Debreu to illustrate how it happened. Using the work of Leo Corry on the fate of the Bourbakist program in mathematics, we demonstrate that many of the same problems of the search for a formalstructurewith which to ground mathematical practice also happened in the case of Debreu. We view this case study as an alternative exemplar to conventional discussions concerning the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics in science.

A wide array of phenomena lumped together under the rubric of the ?commercialization of science,? the ?commodification of research,? and the ?marketplace of ideas? are both figuratively and literally Ponzi schemes. This thesis grows out of my experience of working on two concurrent projects: the first, an attempt to understand the forces behind the progressive commercialization of science; and the second, when it dawned upon me that the financial crisis then unfolding was resulting in the deepest worldwide economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This lecture explores the parallels in three different areas: the biotech sector, technology transfer offices at major universities, and possible decline of numbers of American-authored papers in major science journals

This 1994 collection of interdisciplinary essays was the first to investigate how images in the history of the natural and physical sciences have been used to shape the history of economic thought. The contributors, historians of science and economics alike, document the extent to which scholars have drawn on physical and natural science to ground economic ideas and evaluate the role and importance of metaphors in the structure and content of economic thought. These range from Aristotle's discussion of the division of labour, to Marshall's evocation of population biology, to Hayek's dependence upon evolutionary concepts, and more recently to neoclassical economists' invocation of chaos theory. Resort to such images, contributors find, was more than mere rhetorical flourish. Rather, appeals to natural and physical metaphors serve to constitute the very subject matter of the discipline and what might be accepted as the 'economic'.

This was the first cross-over book into the history of science written by an historian of economics. It shows how 'history of technology' can be integrated with the history of economic ideas. The analysis combines Cold War history with the history of postwar economics in America and later elsewhere, revealing that the Pax Americana had much to do with abstruse and formal doctrines such as linear programming and game theory. It links the literature on 'cyborg' to economics, an element missing in literature to date. The treatment further calls into question the idea that economics has been immune to postmodern currents, arguing that neoclassical economics has participated in the deconstruction of the integral 'self'. Finally, it argues for an alliance of computational and institutional themes, and challenges the widespread impression that there is nothing else besides American neoclassical economic theory left standing after the demise of Marxism.

What could be the motives for producing a Popperian half‐life such as the present volume? This work, which takes Karl Popper right up to his debut on the world stage with the assumption of his position at the London School of Economics, displays no inclination to follow up with the complementary second half of Popper's life sometime in the future. Indeed, the author admits that the omitted subsequent “public Popper” was frequently an embarrassment. Here is truncation with a purpose: this book is written to recommend the work of the early Popper to the “academic left” and to “historiciz[e] the postmodern predicament [as] an antidote to current false consciousness” . Since this is a work in social/political theory masquerading as biography, I shall respond in kind.There have recently been a spate of attempts to revisit the major figures of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century, primarily for the purpose of explaining to ourselves what it was that provoked such an efflorescence of ingenuity, only to result in the subsequent letdown we now confront or enjoy: Cartwright et al. on Neurath, Fuller on Kuhn, and Kadvany on Lakatos. Malachi Hacohen admits that this constitutes his motive as well: he is impressed with the early Popper's political leftism and anti‐foundationalism, regarding the later Cold Warrior as a sad retrogression. It seems to me, however, that he has missed the major lesson of all these retrospectives. Crudely, what emerges from these exercises, as a group, is the thesis that the looming significance in general intellectual discourse of philosophers of science in the mid‐twentieth century was due to the fact that they were doing social theory all along under the guise of describing Science. Furthermore, their question of the true nature of legitimate Science was seen as a crucial preliminary to understanding which politico‐economic system would come to dominate in the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.From this perspective, I strongly doubt that Popper's social significance ever derived from his durable “solution” of any pressing philosophical problems: Did he really proffer a usable “demarcation criterion” for science, or rectify the problem of induction, or adequately describe probabilities as propensities, or banish “subjectivism” from physics, or even really demonstrate that Marxism was untestable? No, during the Cold War it turned out that the very best apologists for Western society were leftists and anti‐foundationalists; and one can observe this in the history of postwar social sciences like economics and psychology, as well as the philosophy of science. Kuhn et al. then took the next logical step in the sequence: something like “critical rationalism” was widely deemed a thoroughly implausible account of social organization in an anti‐foundationalist context . Social order had to be reconceptualized and reimposed, be it through “normal science,” “progressive research programs,” or whatever.Hence, banishing the half‐life of the Cold Warrior from the biographical account is to parade a pointless Popper in a plotless Punch‐and‐Judy show. Hacohen rightly cautions the reader about the unreliability of Popper's autobiography Unended Quest, but he should have taken more to heart Popper's assertions therein that although he knew almost no social theory, that didn't prevent him from seeking to dictate good “scientific method” to the social sciences ; and furthermore, that his vaunted method of “situational analysis” was little more than a repackaging of neoclassical economics as a general methodology for the social sciences . Thus when Hacohen proposes “situational logic” as a template for his historiography, is he sufficiently aware that he is merely participating in the general movement to extend neoclassical economics as a Theory of Everything for our contemporary globalized situation? If the purpose really was to demonstrate that Popper was situatedly rational, there would be no pressing need to write a biography; one could just as well fit his data to a generic maximization model. History should make us rather more self‐conscious about our scholarly and political options, not less

Is rhetoric just a new and trendy way toépater les bourgeois?Unfortunately, I think that the newfound interest of some economists in rhetoric, and particularly Donald McCloskey in his new book and subsequent responses to critics, gives that impression. After economists have worked so hard for the past five decades to learn their sums, differential calculus, real analysis, and topology, it is a fair bet that one could easily hector them about their woeful ignorance of the conjugation of Latin verbs or Aristotle's Six Elements of Tragedy. Moreover, it has certainly become an academic cliché that economists write as gracefully and felicitously as a hundred monkeys chained to broken typewriters. The fact that economists still trot out Keynes's prose in their defense is itself an index of the inarticulate desperation of an inarticulate profession.