Keith Tribe is one of the foremost experts of German Cameralism, so it was with some surprise that I found Constructing Economic Science to be a story about the institutionalization of economic education in Britain rather than a global or comparative history writ large. It is, however, a remarkably detailed history, so much so that a reader might be easily overwhelmed with the length necessary for a volume covering the trajectories of two nations with similar granularity.
Tribe charts the rise of the economics department, accounting for both its creation and the particular character it takes on over the course of the twentieth century: scientific inquiry based largely on abstract and formal principles. One of the remarkable elements of the story relayed is what appears to be the extremely contingent nature of the trajectory of the development of economics, influenced by institutional structures but largely the product of specific individuals, their personalities, vision, and, in some cases, shortcomings. Part II documents the process by which Alfred Marshall carved out a space for economics as a subject at Cambridge. Part III engages in counterfactual reasoning. First Tribe explores the mainly institutional factors as to why Oxford did not forge ahead in establishing a new economics curriculum. The answer here is a combination of factors that includes the absence of Alfred Marshall or a comparable figure, the conservative nature of a system based on familiarity with classics, and the lack of separation between economics, politics, and philosophy, which led the economics that was practiced and taught into a more policy-oriented direction. Chapter 8 of part III addresses the diminished influence of economic history within the larger discipline. Here Tribe counters accepted versions of history, suggesting that there was not any process of intentional exclusion or marginalization but rather the failure of those figures best positioned to advance the cause of a unified and distinct version of economics based in history.
Part IV turns to the drawn-out battle between models of business or commercial education versus economics as a scientific endeavor. This section and in particular the final chapter, “The Scientisation of Economics,” will be of particular interest to those tracking the turn to classical and neoliberal economics as it addresses the movement of economics away from problems of inequality, poverty, and social welfare, a tendency to become less policy-focused, and a shift from pragmatic empiricism to analytic deductivism. Central to the process are arguments unfolding across that national landscape about “education, commerce, and national wealth.” A fascinating story unfolds in this chapter describing how Lionel Robbins’s influential vision of economics was derived from an incomplete and imperfect knowledge of Austrian economics and nursed along in some small part by Friedrich Hayek. Robbins’s story, which is pieced together by Tribe with some dazzling historical detective work, raises a question not addressed but that might be answered with more comparative analysis. Was the scientization of economics at the London School of Economics due to the fact that Lionel Robbins, a man with an imperfect knowledge of economics, was put in charge of economic education there—or was it instead the tractability of his misbegotten vision that made his version of economics so influential, perhaps even contributing to his appointment and institutional influence?
These kinds of larger structural questions can be partially obscured under the wealth of detail supplied by Tribe. We hear who Robbins read, who Robbins taught, and what students thought of his lectures. And Robbins was not the only individual to be treated in such depth. Indeed, there was information, spanning the century, covered about course requirements, exam questions, assigned readings, and even excerpts from student papers. At some points, I almost felt as though I were on an internal university committee evaluating course and major requirements.
The abundance of detailed information underscores what I think is one of the more revolutionary points made by this book. We often think of knowledge as a process of discovery or perhaps a discourse that unfolds according to an internal logic. Tribe poses an alternative perspective, that knowledge and science are created by the education process. This implies that many of the things that we experience as the more mundane aspects of academic life, crafting a syllabus, serving as director of graduate studies—service work rather than research—are actually shaping the course of our disciplines, and thereby the course of knowledge production. In the case of economics, the consequences would be even more far-reaching as the knowledge produced also directly influenced state policy decisions that have impacted the lives of billions over time. Because of this, I find the wealth of details to be a double-edged sword in the book, at times burying the theoretical contribution that links the trajectory of research to details of the educational process but also illuminating in practice the potentially incremental and even tedious choices that may lead to long-term change.
Either way, the book provides unparalleled access to the lives, friendships, habit of mind, and bureaucratic techniques of several generations of economic thinkers central to the institutionalization of the discipline in Britain. Readers can hope to gain fascinating insights into the evolution of economic thought and the evolution of the modern university. It will be a valuable book for historians of economic thought, sociologists of knowledge, and scholars in the field of education studies.
