Constructing Economic Science: The Invention of a Discipline

Constructing Economic Science (Tribe, 2022) deals with the creation of an academic discipline, economics, out of arguments and materials that had developed in a public domain since the early seventeenth century. As the subtitle suggests, it is concerned with the phase of invention; only slightly with that of innovation, and not really at all with the process of diffusion that began in the mid-twentieth century. It is primarily a British story, since the focus is not on “knowledge”, but the institutional mechanisms through which “knowledge” is created, validated, reproduced and legitimised. It is focussed on the development of routines for teaching and certifying undergraduates, for this mundane activity is the motor of any academic discipline. Without students, any discipline will die; and the replicable routines through which students are taught, inducted, shape them and the future of the discipline. This all began in England. There were many economists in universities around the world in the first half of the twentieth century, but a routinised system for training was lacking in Germany until the 1920s, and in France until about the early 1950s.

Some have found this argument difficult to discern beneath a mass of institutional, personal and textual detail that charts the progress from the first foundation of an undergraduate programme at Cambridge in 1903, to its displacement by the undergraduate teaching of the LSE in the 1930s. This focus on an undergraduate training in Britain proved to be its undoing when faced with the opportunities for graduate education in the USA. But the American undergraduate major still completes a four-year course having been exposed to less economic teaching than a three-year economics student in Britain, while the Bologna process has introduced the (failed) English model to European universities.