The When, the How and the Why of Mathematical Expression inthe History aswarany of Economics Analysis puke Philip Mirowski The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), 145-157. Stable URL hitp://links jstor-org/siisici=089S-3309% 28 199 124%295%3A 1% 3C 145% 3A TWTHAT%3E2.0,CO%3B2-K The Journal of Economic Perspectives is currently published by American Economic Association, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hutp:/uk,jstor.org/abouvterms.himl. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obiained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of journal or multiple copies oF articles, and you ‘may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use, Please contact the publisher regarding any further use ofthis work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hupsfuk,jstor-org/joumals/aca. hm Each copy of any part of @ JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission. STOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org, hup//uk jstozorg/ Tue Mar 22 12:41:06 2005Journal of Economic Perspectves—Volume 5, Number 1—Winter 1991—Pages 145-157 The When, the How and the Why of Mathematical Expression in the History of Economic Analysis Philip Mirowski hen one reads about the history of the use of math omics, one gets the impression of a few brave but lonely c Isnard (1781), natical expres jovators—like Daniel Bernoulli (1738), Achil N.-F. Canard (1801), Johann von Thiinen (1826) and Antoine-Augustin Cournot (1838)—present at the creation of economic thought; and later a feisty band of visionaries associated with the “Marginalist Revolution’ of the century who had the right tools in their rucksacks; and then, finally, the full flowering of activity in the postwar period. Through it all there is the unmistak- able conviction that this movement was cumulative, inevitable, and indeed, natural. I do not think this characterization extreme. Consider, for instance, the card Debreu (1986, p. 1261) opinion of Gi [he development of mathematical economies [was] a powerful, irr sistable current of thought. Deductive reasoning about social phen invited the use of mathematics from the first... economics was in privileged position to respond to this invitation, for wo of its central concepts, commodity and price, are quantified in a unique manne soon as units of measurement are chosen ....The differential calculus and linear algebra were applied to that [commodity-price] space as a ma While such notions are I want (0 argue that they stre not historically valid. The purpose of this pap \doubtedly widely held among practicing economists, © Philip Mirouski is Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.146 Journal of Economic Perspectives to suggest that the deployment of mathematical expression in ecor course enjoyed neither an inexorable nor unhindered progress, but rather was characterized by two primary ruptures in the history of economic thought, episodes marking the inflection points in the rise of mathematical discourse ‘The main reason for such a disjointed narrative is that, in the context of the evolution of economic thought, most of the participants were nol convinced that the subject matter intrinsically demanded mathematical expression, while those so enamored experienced great difficulty in creating a community which could agree upon a formalism which was thought to be well-suited to economic Inflection Points in Mathematical Discourse Whilst spotty and isolated instances of mathematical reasoning exist prior to the work of Cournot, they had absolutely no impact upon the quotidian discourse of political economy; indeed, as Baumol and Goldfeld (1968, p. xi) put it, “the theorist of today can manage quite well without most of them.” Bernoullis “solution” to the Petersburg Paradox was a local suggestion regard- ing problems in the classical theory of probability, and was neither nor entertained as a theory of relative price (Daston, 1988, p. 76). C attempt to late market exchange to D’Alembert’s Principle and the equilibrium of the lever was widely judged a failure (Mirowski, 1989b, pp. 5). William Whewell himself admitted that his formalization of supply 1 only bore a “faint and distant resemblance of the state of things perpetual struggle and conflict of such principles with variable Whewell, 1971 [1831] p. 12; Mirowski, 1990a). Even Cournot’s work on his “law of sales” might be regarded as a “freak,” in the words of Baumol and Goldfeld Such observations raise a number of provocative questions. For example, how does one judge mathematical reasoning to be a “failure” in economics? Was the flawed character of mathematical discourse prior to Cournot (or Walras or Samuelson) responsible for the great indifference which greeted it? How can the historical indifference of economists be squared with the above assertions of Debreu that price and quantity are naturally quantitative terms, and that the application of the differential calculus should have been naturally applied as a matter of course?! The earliest proponents of mathematical expression in economics from Cova and Beccaria (Theocharis, 1983) to Canard and Whewell all noticed that prices were expressed as ratios, but had great difficulty in conceptualizing the “The idea that failure of mathematical discourse may be located discussed by Polya (in Tymoceko, 1986), Mary les (84) Jo 19-21) and the present author (088, ch, 8) The plcily based upon these philosophical textsPhilip Mirowski 147 underlying primitives of the analysis: in other words, what principle rendered those ratios determinate, and how could one maintain that any of those conditions themselves exhibited mathematical integrity? Without exception, all of these so-called “ precursors in mathematical economics” looked to the physics of motion, referred to as “rational mechanics” in the 18th century, to provide them with the analogies needed to guide them in their conceptualization of value; indeed, many from Bernoulli 10 Whewell and Cournot explicitly dis- cussed the role of this analogy in their reasoning, The one thing which links together all the mathematical writers prior to the neoclassicals is the admission, grudging or no, that the failure of analogy between rational mechanies and the price system was so pervasive and that their own precursors’ versions were so flawed that this research program had yet to attain a state of cumulative selfassured internal development. This suggests that the mere fact of the numerical character of prices was not sufficient to justify applying mathematics to economic discourse This situation changed dramatically after the middle of the nineteer centuty, which provides the first major discontinuity in the history of mathe- ‘matical economics. It was never quite enough merely to borrow some particular mathematical technique from elsewhere: after all, the calculus was invented in the seventeenth century, but only managed to diffuse into economic discourse in the late nineteenth century. What happened after roughly 1870 was that the analogical barrier to a social mechanics was breached decisively by the influx of a cohort of scientists and engineers trained specifically in physics who conceived 1 project to be nothing less than becoming the guarantors of the scientific character of political economy: among others, this cohort included William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Irving Fisher, Viliredo Pareto, and a whole host of others.” They succeeded where others had failed because they had uniformly become impressed with a single mathematical metaphor that they were all familiar with, that of equilibrium in afield of force. “They were all so very taken with this metaphor which equated potential energy with “utility” (or rareté or “ophelimity” or “wantability’—the specific name ‘was irrelevant) that they—in some cases even unaware of each others’ activities —copied the physical mathematics literally fem for term and dubbed the result ‘mathematical economics Hence the key to the rise of neoclassical economies, which is coextensive with the institution of the first ongoing program of mathematical economics, is not the fact that an analogy was drawn from physical theory—all precursors of mathematical economics engaged in that endeavor—but rather that a critical mass of theorists each (independently or not) adopted the same mathematical metaphor. Since there finally was a shared language and a shared metaphor, Both the specific physi backround ofeach ofthese neoclassical economists and the term-forterm translation of energy physics into the jargon of neelasical economics is discussed in Mirowski (19806, chap. 3)148 Journal of Economic Perspectives serious discourse concerning the implications of this construct could begin in earnest. Indeed, since mathematical research in any applied discipline consists of orderly criticism of analogy, only at the point where common analogic ground was jointly acknowledged to exist could sustained mathematic ing be said to commence. Because there were no economics journals nor other continuous indicators of the nature of economic discourse which cover the entire nineteenth century, this first great discontinuity of mathematical eco- nomics in the period 1870-90 must be demonstrated by means of indirect and narrative evidence.® Prior to the 19: ysical metaphor of the vector potential field adopted by neoclassical economics was the only coherent mathematical ‘metaphor readily available to economists. For instance, there was absolutely no agreement on how one might mathematically express or formalize Marxian economic theory; or again, there was much uncertainty over how to accommo- date neoclassicism with the novel probabalistic mathematics, as evidenced by the work of Edgeworth (Mirowski, 1989; forthcoming). However, mathemati cal expertise was as yet nowhere a hallmark of the professional economist, and the level of mathematical acquaintance of many neoclassical theorists of the next generation such as John Bates Clark, Jacob Viner, Langford Price, Eugen von Bihm-Bawerk, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Edwin Seligman and Frank Knight was negligible. This gave rise to the curious situation that all sorts of claims and counter claims were made about neoclassical theory in this period, such as, say, the requirements of a theory of utility, without any framework or criteria to evaluate their validity By 1920, the neoclassical “ marginalist revolution” had achieved little more than a tenuous beachhead. There was widespread resistance if not outright hostility towards the core neoclassical tenet of a social mechanics, which was often associated with the phenomenon of mathematical economics. One ob- serves this stance among the American Institutionalist movement and the Historicist schools of Germany and England in this period." Moreover, the original marginalist cadre had not been able to require the same training in physics and mathematics for their own students which they themselves had enjoyed, largely because economics was only just becoming professionalized in this period. As a consequence, the next generation of neodlassical economists were not equally unalloyed enthusiasts of a rigidly mathematical discourse, and their publications reveal this ambivalence. Finally, the pl the reader is dvected to (Mirowski, 1989b; 199025 forthcoming) for discussion of the specific ‘motivations, both internal to and external t the economics professo find the paricular metaphor ofa force fed so compelling "The auutude of Amerian Insitationalits such a Thorstein Veblen, John R, Commons and Wesley Clair Mitchell towards the imitation of physics is discussed in Mivowski 1988, ch. 7). The best source om the English Histricist movement is Koot (I9N7), There is not yet any synoptic survey ofthe German Historicst, lish; but Werner Sombar’s Dev Moderne Kaplan is slated to be published in E by Princeton University Press ‘which caused this cor to“Mathematical Expression in the History of Economie Analysis 149. the carly marginalists had come under some heavy fire from physicists and mathematicians such as Vito Vokerra, Joseph Bertrand, Paul Painlevé and Henri Laurent for their incorrect and infelictous uses of the physical metaphor, especially with regard to questions of integrability and the integrity of a conservative preference field (Mirowski, 1989b, pp. 241-250). Consequently, earlier claims to have attained definitive scientific status simply by means of mathematical expression had grown vulnerable and hard to justify. ‘Thus, mathematical discourse occupied only a tenuous position within economics in the half-century or so after the rise of neoclassical economics, ‘The second quantum leap in the application of mathematical discourse to economic theory may be dated with somewhat more precision in the decade 1925-35. One index of this discontinuity is presented in Figure 1, which reports the results of an extensive survey and review of the journal literature in economics for the period 1887-1955. In this tabulation, an independent determination has been made whether mathematical discourse was central 10, each individual article: if the answer was yes, then the entire page count was tabulated; if the answer was no, a second determination was made as to whether some subset of article pages legitimately used mathematical reasoning, and that page count was tabulated, The tabulation was not based upon a sample; every volume of the journals in the sample was examined. This procedure was carried out for representative generalist journals of the fledgling economics profession in the three countries of France, Great Britain and the United States. These criteria of long-term publication and representative ap- peal for professional economists resulted in the choice of the Revue D’ Economie Politique [RDP], the Economic Journal (EJ), the Quarterly Journal of [Q JE], and the Journal of Political Economy [JPE ically from other suc exercises to quantify the extent of ive, LN: Grubel | 19K6. Anderson, Golf and ical decision procedure is quantify the fourse, sual as tabulation of numbered ‘equations pet page, percentage of pages of aces thing algebra or geometry. However, the bare format of symbolic expression should not he ematical reasoning. A mote satisfactory approach oeds wo take into account the natical discourse: an article couched entitely im prose but conc Claborate discussion ofthe use of mathematics iv economies may make many profound mathemat fal points, whereas another article which inchides sn equation o to ina footnote as irrelevant trindow-dressng elletively has litle or no mathematical content a all. Further, examination of Content allows anesstient of less tangible attributes scl as hostility to mathematical expression, of to neoclassical theory, orto particular clases of formalism, ‘Aso. AEA members may wonder why the merce Browoic Review is not includ tabulation. The primary retson fs that it only began publication in 1911, much later than the JPA nd @ JE But there iso the consideration that due to the influence of Richard Ely om the early [AEA, the HER was not considered to be as sympathetic to “theory” asthe JPE and Q JE in theie carly years Gur tabulations are of course biased by the omission of journals such as Econometrica and Review of Economic Stuies which were entirely devoted to mathematical eum journals were started up in the 130s and follow the pattern described above, our index under Imaggitude of the rupture in the peviod 1925-35, subieties of ma id i But since these150 Journal of Economic Perspectives Figure 1 Mathematical Discourse in Four Economics Journals Revue D'Leonomie Pe 0) wi 190 Quarterly Journal of Economies & 20 sso 1900 1920 10 1960 Journal of Political Economy S80 100 1920) 1980 Ti Economie Journal vob aso 1900 10 1910 7 As Figure 1 shows, most economics journals look very much alike when it comes to mathematical discourse from roughly 1887 to 1924. Journals rarely devote more than 5 percent of their pages 10 n nd in no journal does the proportion of mathematical pages venture beyond one stan. dard deviation of zero, Interestingly enough, the mean proportion for the Revue is actually a little higher than the JPE, which suggests that, at | thematical discourse,Philip Mirowski 151 respect, France was not substantially different from the United States. The Economie Journal may appear somewhat aberrant with respect to the 5 percent ceiling, until one notices that in this period 39 percent of its total mathematical pages are accounted for by a single author: Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, one of the editors of that journal from 1891 until his death in 1926, When it came to mathematical expression, even a crusading editor could not make all that much difference. Nevertheless, a pronounced change of regime with regard to mathematical discourse happened within the decade 1925-35, with the Q JE leading the way and the JPE tracking it to 1933, resisting intensification from 1934 to 1944, and then joining the Q /é at the new plateau of roughly 25 percent in the early 1950s. A less marked increase in mathematical discourse can be observed in the J inthe same period (partly because it began from a higher mean proportion}; and yet, for both the EJ and the RDP the new plateau clearly dates from just alter World War II, with roughly 20 percent of journal pages devoted (0 mathematical discourse, From this evidence, it seems that the critical second “rupture” in the economics profession took place in the decade of the Depres- Examination of the character of the papers before and afier the second “rupture” indicates clearly that the newly-achieved level of mathematical dis- coutse was fairly narrowly associated with the neoclassical research program. It is a mistake to associate the new format of discourse and technique as some general improvement in mathematical techniques or sophistication in economic concepts; instead, it was more nearly a reflection of a change in the structure and character of the neoclassical research program, This watershed in the program was multi-faceted, including not only more selfconsciousness in the formalization of discrete models, but also the reconciliation of the neoclassical program with some of its empirical shortcomings, its troublesome infelicties left over from the 19th century field-of-force metaphor, and the cautious accommo- dation with stochastic mathematics (Mirowski, 1989a; 1989), Afier this rup- ture, neoclassical articles tended to displace those of other rival research programs in page volume, and each neoclassical article was more likely to have 4 primarily mathematical orientation What accounts for this second rupture? Full exploration of this question would demand extensive historical illustration; for present purposes we shall simply state a few stark theses. By the 1920s, the neoclassical research program was in trouble in most academic contexts. Few economists placed much cre= dence in the concept of utility; many mocked it openly, like the partisans of the American Institutionalist school, It had never gained much of a foothold in France. Marshall's Cambridge was the primary stronghold; but the denizens of that citadel mostly maintained an ironic distance with regard to the physics formalism and its attendant mathematical devices. Moreover, since most of the second generation of neoclassical theorists were not as well-versed in mathemat ics or physics as their predecessors, their defenses of the program grew more152 Jounal of Economic Perspectives and more inconsistent and idiosyncratic, primarily because they had no concep- tion of what neoclassical theory ruled out and what it permitted. The internal consistency of the Marshallian program of supply and demand schedules then came under attack by J. H. Clapham, Piero Sraffa and others in the 1920s, particularly in the EJ, impugning the only textbook literature neoclassicals could point towards. After 1917, Marxism loomed on the horizon as something more than an irrelevant fringe doctrine. Into this unstable situation, propelled largely by contracting opportunities in the physical sciences, but sometimes also by a fervent desire to apply the scientific method to the social betterment of mankind, came an unprecedented wave of trained scientists and engineers into economies. The roll call is stun ning, and included Ragnar Frisch, Tjalling Koopmans, Jan Tinbergen, Mauri Allais, Kenneth Arrow and a host of others. For the first time, noted mathe- maticians such as John von Neumann, Griffith Evans, Harold Thayer Davis, Edwin Bidwell Wilson and others were induced to turn their attention, how ever briefly, (0 economics, and to participate in its elaboration rather than to jeer from the sidelines. When this influx of talent became acquainted with the corpus of neoclassical theory, they discovered that it consisted largely of the formal models which they had already mastered in their earlier training in physics, with the only difference being that the vintage of the model was clearly that of the later 19th century. Thus, with only the most passing acqu with the long tradition of economic theorizing, these tyros could jump right in and apply more up-to-date mathematical techniques and metaphors to the neoclassical program and come up with far-reaching results 1 will provide just one illustration for those who find such claims inflam- matory. In a talk delivered to the American Physical Association in New York January 29, 1979, Tjalling Koopmans (Koopmans Collection, Sterling Manuscript Room, Yale University, Box 18, folder 333) explained: Why did I leave physics at the end of 19337 In the depth of the worldwide economic depression, I felt that the physical sciences were far ahead of the social and economic sciences. What had held me back was the completely different, mostly verbal, and to me almost indigestable style of writing in the social sciences. Then I learned from a friend that there was a field called mathematical economies, and that Jan Tinbergen, a former stu- dent of Paul Ehrenfest, had left physies to devote himself to economics. Tinbergen received me cordially and guided me into the field in his own inimitable way. I moved to Amsterdam, which had a faculty of economics. The transition was not easy. I found that I benefited more from sitting in and listening to discussions of problems of economic policy than from reading the tomes. Also, because of my reading block, 1 chose problems that, by their nature, or because of the mathematical tools required, have similarity with physicsMathematical Expression in the History of Economic Analysis 153 Further, new formalisms developed during the intervening evolution of physics—the increased stress on stochastic formalisms, the improved mathe- matics of vector fields and phase spaces, the increased familiarity with linear algebra and constrained optimization—which could be readily superimposed upon the older structure of discourse.® The net result was a new discourse self-consciously patterned upon the rhetoric of the scientific research report, shilfing the intellectual center of gravity from the book or essay to the journal anticle constructed around a mathematical “model,” eschewing the carlier discursive mode of expression accessible to economist and non-economist alike. The calling card of the new, improved neoclassical program was the mathemat- ics of someone trained in physics circa 1935; if mathematics were indeed a language, neoclassical economics at this time was a local dialect Taking the Measure of Man and His Commodities Mathematics is not singular, but rather plural. Because of this fact, there ‘was no single unique way that mathematics could or should enter economics, contrary to those who see it as some genetic species of rigorous rational discourse. As we have seen, neither could it be a simple process of diffusion across disciplinary boundaries, since that would precisely beg the question of the appropriate discipline to imitate. The mere fact that price and quantity are expressed as numbers in the quotidian operation of markets was not sufficient to persuade generations of political economists that mathematical discourse would be regarded as uniquely correct or appropriate in discussions of the In fact, the notion that commodities exhibit a natural isomorphism to a real Euclidean vector space is the most deeply rooted unobtrusive postulate in modern economic theory. The modern view is captured by Debreu, as in the quotation at the start of this article. Or as he has put it elsewhere (Debreu, 1984, pp. 267-268), “The fact that commodity space has the structure of a real vector space is a basic reason for the success of the mathematicization of economic theory.” To gain some perspective on this issue, we must have recourse to one of the other human sciences which has not been quite so interested in the imitation of physics. Let us begin with a quote from the anthropological literature, which was intended to illustrate the cultural bias of many discussions of mathematics (Ascher and Ascher, 1986, p. 128): The conventional wisdom is well encapsulated in an anecdote that is repeated wholly or in part with such frequency that it must have special "The one exception to this teansfer of mathematics from physics to economics has 10 da. with techniques developed to handle physical dynamics, such as Hamitonian methods and Liapunov techniques, On the reasons for this curious lacuna, see Weintraub CTorthcoming) and Mirowski (1989, ch. 7154 Journal of Economic Perspectives appeal. The anecdote tells of an exchange between a native Afr Demara sheep herder and someone else variously described as an ex- plorer, trader, scientist, anthropometrist, or ethnologist. It is intended to show that the herder cannot comprehend the simple arithmetic fact that 2 +2 (or 2x 2)=4. It describes how the herder agrees to accept two sticks of tobacco for one sheep but becomes confused and upset when given four sticks of tobacco afier a second sheep is selected. Of course, the problem is not that the shepherd does not understand arithmetic, it is rather that the scientist/trader does not understand sheep. Sheep are not standardized units, Since the Demara herder finally agreed to the trade, his confusion could be attributed to the trader’s willingness to pay an nt for the second, different animal, equal amo Ifthe algebraic structure of commodity measurements is fixed by nature, then such analytical freedom should not be allowed. Does nature impose the mathe- matical structure, or is it the analyst? The answer can be tendered on two levels, one abstract, and the other historical. On the first level, i should be clear that commodity identity (and hence the group character of commodity addition) is not at all given by nature. Take that favorite of textbooks, the example of apples and oranges, To every individual qua individual (and especially for a committed utilitarian), each apple is different: some bigger, some stunted, some moutled, some McIntosh, some coated with stuff that looks pretty but will ill you slowly, and so forth, The date of its existence may be relevant, as may the situation within which it is regarded. Pushing this argument to its extreme, from a personal point of view Gone can always find something about each apple which renders it unique. More discurbingly, what is legitimate metric in apple/orange space? 1 am not claiming here that modern actors do not in fact treat apples and oranges as indifferently substitutable in certain situations; only that from the vantage of methodological individualism, the analogy between commodities and directions in space is certainly not dictated by nature. Such abstract notions can themselves be rendered more concrete by histor- ical research, For instanee, the eminent historian Witold Kula (1986) has 7A neoclassical economist might immediately think that he or she has an explanation for this incident-that increased demand should raise the price-but the economists should reflect upon the anomaly that the herder ulimately accepted the fire price, 8 he should if the commaities were Corey defined as identical and the lo of one price actually is a “law.” OF course, the neoclassical ‘explanation can be rescued by a judicious redefini fhumerous other occasions (witness Debrew's on redel precisely the gist ofthe present objection “hold also be pointed out that the intruder upon the sheep herder is not neoclassical conomist which raises the ise of whether this bine spot is nota broader cultural phenomenon. would entre tht is broad characteristic of soil scientists bent upon quantification as part oft program of rendering their discipline a science ‘of commonity identity, as it fas be ofthe dated « bout this isPhilip Mirowski 155 reminded us that standardized commodity sasurements are a relatively re- cent phenomenon, becoming instituted long after market relations were preva- lent. In earlier times many commodity metrics were gauged by arbitrary anthropometric units, such as butter by the “round,” wool by the “ honey by the “hand,” land by the amount that could be plowed in a single day, and so on, Of course, one man’s plowday was not identical to another's; one man’s ell could not be divided by his own “foot” nor by another's; the spice merchant's pound was not the same as the butcher's; the bushel of one serf need not be the same as that of a second. By and large, measures did not exhibit the invariance required (o constitute algebra as we know it. Moreover, in such a milieu price could not perform the functions which are commonly attributed to it in neoclassical models: indeed, in many situations the money price was held invariant in order to carry out calculations, while the various physical measures of the commodities were altered in reaction to alterations in supply (Kula, 1986, pp. 72-78). “The lesson to draw from such work is that quantification is itself not an fariant in human history, even within the more limited subset of market organized structures. Prices in modern markets obviously conform to specific algebraic structures, but they are not the a prior’ products of nature or of the individual mind (through projection of completeness, reflexivity, transitivity, and so on upon preference structures); rather, they are provisional invariances imposed upon the motley variety of human perception by various conventions and social structures (Mirowski, 1990). If this be the case, then the argument becomes stronger that the mathe- maticization of economic discourse should not be traced to the natural quan- tification of commodities, but rather should be explained empirically by changing. social perceptions of the symmetries and invariances read into market activities through the instrumentality of social institutions. For instance, the standardiza- identities is a market process of progressive abstraction frot artisanal idiosyneracies and enforced by auxiliary social structures, like trade- marks and other such “advertising.” In this view, the reason that moder economic actors express prices as ratios is that the following regularities are being projected onto their quotidian exchange activities: (1) The commodity preserves its idemtity through the exchange process, (2) Buying nothing should cost nothings (3) The order in which items are presented for purchase should not snce the amount paid in the aggregate; (4) Dividing the aggregate into subsets and paying for each separately should not influence the sum paid; (5) The net result of buying an item and then returning it should be zero; (6) Everyone should pay the same price for the same item. Hence the reason that algebra (and probably abstract algebra) are neces- sary to describe modern market activity is that market structures have histori- tion of commodi intl156 Journal of Economic Perspectives cally evolved to the point where these six principles reify the impersonal character of appropriation, This has absolutely nothing to do with “equi librium” or any other metaphor borrowed from physics. Such considerations lead to a very different conception of the role of mathematics in the history of economic discourse than that found in previous discussions, Here, history and mathematics, so often regarded as polar oppo- sites in economic discourse, are united in a single narrative, albeit one far removed from the neoclassical penchant to root social relations in some purely natural determinants, Here, mathematics both expresses and enforces the way ‘our culture has decided to organize exchange. = The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which greatly assisted in the preparation of this paper. Joshua Rosenfeld and John Pepper went above and beyond the call of research assistantship, which made the survey of economies journals possible. Timothy Taylor and Gavin Wright made extremely perceptive and helpful comments on an earlier draft, but should not beheld responsible for any aakwardness or evors which remain. This article is ‘sed upon my books Against Mechanism (1988) and More Heat Than Light (1989).Mathematical Expression in the History of Economie Analysis 157 References Anderson, G., B. Golf, and R. Tollison, The Rive andl (Recent Decline of Mathemat cal Feonomies," Bulletin of the History of Eco tomas Soviet, 1986, 8, 41-47 ‘Ascher, Mo and R. Ascher, “Eshnomathe mats.” Hisory of Sernce, 19N6, 24, 125-144 Baumol, W., and S. Goldfeld, «cls, Prev says in Mathematical Eromomies ‘An Anthology. London: London School of Beunomies Series ‘of Reprints of Scarce Works on Pail eon Bernoulli, Daniel, “Exponition of a New Hheors.” Is Baume, Wand 8. Golde, feds, Precurany in Mathematical Bromomics: nology. 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