the Economy of the Word

This book, by Keith Tribe, explores themes and topics in the linguistic history of economics. I'm barely gonna write anything here as I already wrote a full review of it for the Rethinking Economics opinion blog (link below). It was a pretty sloggish read, but interesting in an academic sort of way; if you like economics, historical methodology, and the complexities of changeable language use in century-spanning contexts, then this book is right up your street.

HERE'S THE FULL REVIEW I DID

[Edit November 2016: it appears that during a recent re-vamp of Rethinking Economics' website, the entire blog has been lost into the Error 404 ether - so pasted below is my review's text.]

History is the art of constructing causal narratives between past events and holding them up for analysis. The history of economics – how it has been gradually built up and developed as a field of study over centuries – follows the same rule: historians studying the history of economics have to throw themselves fully into the heads of long-dead economists to try to perceive who or what influenced them, how, why, and to what effect on other deceased thinkers.

   Unfortunately, since both normal historical events and the economists studied by one studying the history of economics are, by definition, history – we run into the usual gamut of difficulties ascertaining exactly how a particular event happened, or exactly what a particular economist thought and why. The historiographical issues of correctly sourcing and interpreting texts are predictably smaller for tracing the history of an academic discipline than they are for tracing actual history, but by no means has this seen historians of economics refrain entirely from making unwarranted leaps of assertion.

   Keith Tribe’s book has this complex criticism running throughout. He takes a philological approach; closely scrutinising the language used in canonical texts of economic history to determine exactly what they originally meant. With immensely wide scholarship, he lays out the academic biographies, cultural contexts, and influencing factors on each writer he tackles, to lay the outputs of his philological analysis in an intelligible framework.

   The book’s content is in three parts. Firstly, a discussion of the word ‘economy’. It does not mean the same thing to us as it would have meant to an Ancient Greek or Adam Smith, and thus any historian of economics peering at older uses must revise what they understand the writer to mean. In this opening chapter, he draws out the evolution of the word’s definition from Aristotle to the 20th century, followed by an overview of how rough measures for this final concept of ‘economy’ (i.e. national income, or GDP) came to be numerically constructed. Secondly, he turns to Adam Smith, dissecting with indefatigable precision the historical influences and writings of the Scottish original economist, to show an internal consistency in Smithian arguments about trade in The Wealth of Nations; he also tackles ‘das Adam Smith problem’, the disjoint between selfishness-driven markets apparently espoused by Smith in his economic work, and the altruism-driven social harmonies at the heart of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, his prior treatise in moral philosophy. In the third section, he analyses the work of Karl Marx and Léon Walras, economists whose ideas seem almost wildly opposing given that aspects of their influence have led on the one hand to Communism and on the other to neoclassical apologists for free-market capitalism; but under close historical scrutiny, both of them derive their core understanding of society in a very similar way, from French political economists in an emergent industrial context.

   This content, separated from the main motor of the book which is the philological approach discussed above, would be exceedingly dry and there probably wouldn’t be much point reading it. But because Tribe has so effectively cracked open our awareness of how texts, economists, and language, are situated in historical circumstance, each section proves thoroughly insightful. As a book more about the historiography of economics than about its history, it serves as a refreshing and probably-much-needed rebuke to lazy modern historians who might see the word ‘labour’ in an 1848 article and read into it all their own 2015 assumptions and connotations about what that word implies and derives from. We need instead, when reading old texts, to make the effort of learning historical contexts, following linguistic usage roots back far enough to see where they split, understanding the processes of individual thought enough to recognise and respect them in a figure who we can only access by reading their writings. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Léon Walras, and the dozens of other significant economists discussed in this book, did not produce their ideas in a vacuum alone with only a rough sketch of modern economic theories. That’s not how intellectual progress works. Thinkers’ contemporary settings, things that they read and people they spoke to and socio-political events that befell them, are of enormous importance and it is crucial that we have an acute sensitivity to these when attempting to do history of any kind, including economics. Likewise, the ability to properly grapple with words as historical entities is vital; and this entails sometimes making the imaginative leap into obsolete definitions so that we and whoever we’re reading are on the same page. Language is not constant, nor is economic theory, and the failure to appreciate this pair of stark facts will make a bad historian embarrass himself. Keith Tribe has done great work here in showing how essential to understanding the history of economics a philological approach is. He sheds small patches of light on several topics, but more importantly, demonstrates how hard it actually is to pin down definite knowledge if one is being sloppy. It is truly masterful scholarship.

   The book’s point is also, I think, an important one for the Rethinking Economics movement. Philological analysis of texts yields dense crossovers of influence and discipline – if there is solid historical evidence that Marxian and Walrasian economics derive from the same set of sources, then no conflicting theories should be beyond critical discussion of where they may both be overlappingly right. Also, the methodological approach to language and texts would be a useful one for economics students to learn; admittedly, it’s one that ends up with us being less easily able to know things, but much surer that we’re right when we do. Economics degrees seldom encourage strong verbal reasoning or perceptive reading, but these are skills we do need.

   For any reader interested in the history of economics, I would recommend this; compared to most other texts in the field it treats less of theoretical developments and individual economists’ projects, but for its overall point, widening the scope of how we do (or should do) history, it is an indispensable addition.