ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: how the moral science of political economy became the amoral science of economics: lessons from the leviathan.
Author:
The intellectual imperialism that is modern economic theory understands its origins in the eighteenth century political economy of Adam Smith. The story it tells itself is that what it takes to be Smith’s characterisation of the adequately functioning human actor as calculating ego - as a being with certain needs and wants and with the capacity to think consequentially about how s/he should act in order to best satisfy them - set in train a line of inquiry that ends up with strategically rational accounts of human behaviour in fields some way distant from the narrowly economic. Modern economics claims lineage from Smith but in fact its basic assumptions in respect of human behaviour derive from Thomas Hobbes. It is Hobbes rather than Smith who reduces human behaviour to the strategically rational, and yet the story of the long shadow that Hobbes casts over the development of modern economic inquiry has been all but forgotten. A re-evaluation of Hobbes’s economic thinking is in any case welcome, but especially so for a science that has lost its moral bearings and is now beginning to wonder why.
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