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Leslie Armour: Department of Philosophy, The University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
Economic discourse has two fascinating and perilous features: it tends to make all other social discourse subordinate to it, and it has a strong tendency to influence the processes and events which it describes or predicts[1].
That is to say, descriptions of situations in economic terms tend to be regarded as basic - as getting at the real nature of things. They also change the world they set out to describe.
Both these tendencies help to explain the success of the large and all-embracing - if somewhat amorphous - socio-economic schemata which have been developed from the writings and latent ideas of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Each schema poses serious difficulties. But, if we are to get beyond their limits, it is essential that we understand why each seems to dominate our talk about society and wellbeing and just how each, in various circumstances, has played a role in creating the environment it purports to describe.
Why economic discourse is all-pervasive
Let us start with the tendency of economic discourse to take charge of all discourse about society. It is not that economists are intellectual imperialists. It is rather that, in an interesting way, economics is to human affairs what physics is to the larger world. Just as nothing happens in the world unless it is (among other things) a physical event, so nothing happens in human affairs unless it is an economic event. A stroll in the park burns shoe leather, heightens appetites, influences the likelihood that the stroller will be willing to pay taxes and, of course, diminishes the output which might have been added to the economy had the walker chosen instead to attend to normal business, the breeding of race horses, or the mining of coal. Just having an afternoon nap influences the economy.
In this sense economics is a universal science. One may escape the sociologist if one is sufficiently solitary, and it used to be true that one did not attract the interest of anthropologists while attending the opera in New York. One may surely do things which are of no interest to the geographer or the social psychologist.
In a sense, the general-purpose psychologist is the...