Economists and Societies Marion Fourcade PDF

Socio-Economic Review (2010) 8, 747–764 doi:10.
1093/ser/mwq016
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Marion Fourcade Economists and Societies.
Discipline and Profession in the United States,
Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s.
Princeton and Cambridge, Princeton
University Press, 2009
Keywords: economic sociology, economics, professions, culture, institutions,

France, United Kingdom, USA
JEL classification: A14 sociology of economics, A12 relation of economics to
other disciplines, B0 history of economic thought, methodology, and heterodox
approaches, general, Z13 economic sociology
Bernard Gazier
Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France
Correspondence: gazier@univ-paris1.fr
Economists and Societies (Fourcade, 2009) is a brilliant and fascinating book. It is

especially so for those readers who are economists: they are obliged to question
themselves about who they are and what they are doing. They are confronted
with a mirror reflection that is as unexpected as it is convincing. This disturbing
book presents a well-grounded comparative analysis of economists’ careers and
professional roles in three countries (USA, UK and France, with some additional
elements on Germany and Japan) over roughly the twentieth century (starting
from the end of the nineteenth century and stopping around 1995). Important
authors have developed the idea of the ‘varieties of capitalisms’, challenging the
commonly received conception of the convergence of economies and societies in
a single capitalist model. Marion Fourcade shows that there existed in the twentieth
century and still exist deep and persisting differences in the very definition, identity
# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.
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748 Discussion forum
and careers of economists, differences which are mainly produced and reproduced
nationally. One could speak of the ‘varieties of economists’. The book focuses on
the ways economists are ‘produced’ and employed in specific national spaces,
leading to ‘merchant professionals’ in the USA, ‘public-minded elite’ in the UK
and ‘statist divisions’ in France. It relies on objective and subjective sources, com-
bining statistical and institutional information about the ways diplomas were set
up and evolved, the number of persons officially considered economists, the organ-
izations hosting them, etc., with interviews mainly made between 1995 and 1997:
surveying 95 economists from France, the UK, the USA and Germany.
The originality of the book goes beyond this thesis. It also, and in my view
mainly, lies in the way it boldly connects institutional information about econo-
mists’ careers and the very content of their work: methods, ideas, doctrines. It
does not stop at the door of their offices, but tries, in a challenging way, to con-
sider schools of thought and the thematic and methodological orientations
together with the economic, social and symbolic fate of the profession. It explores
the representations, either dominant or marginal, the internal conflicts and hier-
archies of power and prestige, and follows their evolution over one century.
In order to discuss this very ambitious and provocative approach, breaking
down the pretence of economists and economics to universality, a French socio-
economist like myself (with two such defining professional ‘characteristics’: as a
French university professor working from home, and as a proponent of a ‘soft’
version of doing economics, cooperating with sociologists) can do two comp-
lementary things. The first is to check and possibly confirm, from the inside,
the relevance and accuracy of the information and analyses presented throughout
the chapters, especially in the case of France. This is the role of the informant in
ethnological enquiries: proposing rectifications, qualifications or complements
about the tribe’s customs and vision of the world. The second contribution is
more demanding: it consists in engaging oneself in the reflexive effort about
economics and economists, and questioning the picture as it is set out. This
effort is difficult, but the current worldwide economic crisis makes it more rele-
vant than ever, and even necessary. Fourcade’s book was published in 2009, in
a situation where the profession of economics faced growing criticism and
discontent. What are its implications in this context?
I will try to combine both roles, starting from the method and the results
(expected and unexpected) and then introducing more general comments
about the roots and limits of the autonomy, domination and heterogeneity
observable in the profession.
Regarding the method, it should first be said that the book comes from a PhD
thesis in Sociology, written by a French sociologist, but directed and elaborated
in the USA. As such, it combines a host of different methodological references,
from American sociologists focusing on culture: Lamont, Zelizer, to French
Re-forming capitalism 749
sociologists and philosophers such as Bourdieu, Foucault, Callon. Other references

include the post-Marxist thinker Habermas. While the full-blown approaches of
these authors are not always compatible with each other, Fourcade uses these refer-
ences in a selective way for specific purposes, and sets out a pluralistic but quite
coherent approach. She advocates a dialectical play of influences, from social
needs and representations to the specific development of a profession, and from
the contributions of this profession to economic and social change. This
co-determination is deeply rooted in power stakes, and linked to the way the pro-
fession organizes itself at the national level, from founders, pioneer institutions, to
routine training, recruitment and international contacts and rankings. Her method
can be compared with the analysis made in the 1970s by Maurice et al. (1982)
opposing the way different types of workers were ‘produced’ in France and
Germany. They coined the term ‘societal effect’ because they showed that industry
blue-collar workers in similar firms had career lines, mobility prospects and even
identities systematically differing in both countries: in Germany, skilled workers
trained in the ‘apprenticeship’ system, benefiting from transferable competences,
rather well paid compared with engineers, and in France, less skilled workers,
trained on-the-job, and much less paid compared with French engineers. It suggests
that national ‘institutional complementarities’ are at work, the way workers are
trained/produced is connected with the way they are used in the workplace and
what they are paid. But the analysis here is much more subtle and biting. It is
subtle, because economists are a special kind of white-collar workers, an intellectual
profession combining research, teaching, public intervention, expertise and dealing
with cultural and political collective representations, and because the analysis intro-
duces these changing representations. It is by the same token more biting, because
here power stakes are intense, rapidly evolving and melding with ideology as well as
science. The sociology of this particular elite group leads to questioning its connec-
tion with money, business, and to provide evidence of some blind spots. A nice
example of the corrosive effects of this point of view is given by the analysis of
the ‘Chicago school’ here bluntly—and rightly—characterized by its ‘naturaliz-
ation’ of the competitive model (pp. 93–95).
Among the useful and sometimes unexpected consequences of this special
application of the ‘societal analysis’, one may cite the continuity of the American
tradition of the fact-based quantifying analysis. Fourcade shows that the well-
known rupture between the old ‘institutionalism’ and the currently dominating
neo-classical school is less important than usually postulated when one looks
at the daily practices of American economists, notably the importance of statistics
and data-gathering procedures. She also convincingly explains the long-lasting
cautious attitude of British economists towards mathematics, rooted in the
wide classical bases of their education, and this can be easily opposed to the
(recent) domination of mathematics as the only way of becoming an economist
750 Discussion forum
in France. Regarding this particular ‘tribe’, the present informant confirms the
findings of the analyses, and especially the ‘inescapable contradiction’ between
financial dependence and intellectual independence in which state statistical
and scientific institutions such as INSEE (Institut National de la Statistique et
des Etudes Economiques) are trapped. An additional set of remarks can be
made about the agrégation as the main diploma leading to professorship. It
has been widely criticized since the 1970s, for its old-fashioned formal require-
ments, and also because it allowed young researchers to become professors at
very young ages, typically between 25 and 30. However, the examination survived
the socialist government of 1981, because some agrégés members of the cabinet of
the ministry of education wanted to keep up with the young énarques and to
ensure comparable career opportunities for their followers. The ironic conse-
quence is that a new formalism supplanted the older one at the turn of the
century: mathematics is now the only competence economist professors should
exhibit in order to be recruited.
As regards the overall diagnosis and its connection to the current discontent,
I would like to start by mentioning the only sentence I felt the need to disagree
with in the whole book: the last one! Elegantly turning back to her own discipline
and applying the reflexive approach she developed for economists, Marion Four-
cade writes: ‘The work of sociologists is, after all, evidently subject to the same
logics as those I have tried to expose in our powerful neighbor in the
social-scientific field’ (p. 262). I am not sure that exactly the same logics are oper-
ating, even if economics and sociology are two social sciences.
I would like to stress more than Fourcade the complexity and fragility of the
work of an economist—thinking, computing, making comments and analyses
about money—is not making money; or it is a very specific way of making
some money. The economist’s position is an intermediate stance between pure
knowledge, e.g. practising mathematics or philosophy, and direct business pur-
poses. It is meant to be attracted by something quite political: the question of
why rich and poor people exist, and what to do about that. But there is a
paradox here: economists have long forgotten or rejected the political dimension
of their discipline. As a specificity compared with other social sciences and notably
sociology, economists by definition face immediate instrumental demands
(e.g. should we increase the level of the minimum wage this year?) and too
often they are happy to present immediate, isolated and instrumental answers,
bearing naively all the pressure and neglecting other points of view (political,
sociological . . . ). This helps in understanding the complex role of mathematics
in their thinking: abstract mathematics is a refuge from the political pressure as
much as a tool and a barrier of legitimacy. As I discussed with a colleague at my
university about the challenge of facing the crisis’ disorders, he told me that he
intended to leave them aside because such a short-term event added ‘noise’ to
Re-forming capitalism 751
his data. As a result, there is something fragile in the discipline, and it will remain
so unless economists think seriously about collaborating with other disciplines
and become conscious of the limits of a purely instrumental approach.
This leads to insisting even more on the complexity and plasticity of domination
processes. The book rightly shows the key role of national pathways in the twentieth
century, but remains less assertive about the consequences of the current trends
towards internationalization and imitation of the US practices. Is it possible that
our century may witness a new real convergence of the roles and careers of econom-
ists after these long years of national specificities? Fourcade mentions for the UK and
(to a lesser degree) for France the ‘rise and fall’ of their ‘models’ of production of
economists, but does not say in which direction the current practices lead. This
may weaken her core argument about universality. Maybe the focus on national
coherences (even conflicting ones) leads to overestimating these coherences and
underestimating some equivocal and plastic evolutions. A striking and recent
example, only evoked in the book, is the increasing place of finance as a separately
emerging domain; in France now one-third of polytechniciens specialize in
finance and immediately obtain well-paid careers abroad . . . but they are trained
in applied mathematics, without any knowledge of economics; this dominating,
amnesic and purely technical trend is seemingly not reversed in the current crisis;
it should be contrasted with the stable and very small proportion of polytechniciens
(less than one-tenth) who enter the career of economists through the ENSAE. This
remains in line with Fourcade’s main tenet, the number of French experts of market
competition remains small, and there is no convergence with this expert function at
the core of the definition of economist in the USA. But such evolution suggests that
times of pure and aggressive instrumentality are coming.
My last point will precisely bear on the way we can account for the present
overall situation in economics. Fourcade mentions a number of times that the
profession as well as the discipline is ‘embedded’ or ‘nested’ in various networks
and social relationships. This term has two quite different meanings (Le Velly,
2007). The first one, illustrated by the works of Granovetter (1985), underlines
the permanent support social relationships give to economic exchange and
decisions. Fourcade seemingly refers to this meaning, showing the way econom-
ists do belong to the social structure and representations they live in. There exists
another meaning, originating in the works of Karl Polanyi (1994), who presents
‘embeddedness’ as a situation where the economic– merchant sphere is con-
strained by other spheres (reciprocity, gifts, transfers). This line of analysis
explores the violent and critical tensions generated by the trends towards ‘disem-
beddedness’, i.e. the tendency of the market sphere towards autonomy. Both
meanings are interactive. The market sphere generates its own culture and
‘embeddedness’ in the first meaning, but this may enter into open conflict with
other social spheres, as it is clear now in the current crisis. Sociology’s ‘powerful
752 Review symposium
neighbour’ (Fourcade, op. cit., p. 262) is currently experiencing a mighty trend

towards ‘disembeddedness’ (not to be confused with a convergence towards the
US ‘merchant professional’ model), and this seems curiously left implicit in
this path-breaking book. Maybe, this is the starting point for another one?
References
Fourcade, M. (2009) Economists and Societies, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
Granovetter, M. (1985) ‘Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embedd-
edness’, American Journal of Sociology, 91, 481 –510.
Le Velly, R. (2007) ‘Le problème du désencastrement’, Revue du MAUSS, 29, 181–196.
Maurice, M., Sellier, F. and Silvestre, J. J. (1982) Politique d’éducation et organisation indus-
trielle en France et en Allemagne, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Polanyi, K. (1944) The Great Transformation: The Economic and Political Origins of Our
Time, Boston, MA, Beacon Press.
Peter A. Hall
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
Correspondence: phall@fas.harvard.edu
‘The time has come Walras has said, to speak of many things’. When Paul
Samuelson included Lewis Carroll’s famous words in his textbook on economics,
he did not expect to see them so translated in its 1964 Russian edition, but they
would make an appropriate epigraph for Marion Fourcade’s magisterial compari-
son of the development of economics, as profession and discipline, in Britain,
France and the USA.1 Like all the social sciences, if with more confidence than
the others, economics paints portraits of the world by which those who seek to
prosper in it live. Economics tells us what we are doing when we engage in
economic actions, translating those actions into a meaningful language that
prescribes, with more or less self-consciousness, what should and what cannot
be changed in the world. As this insightful comparative study indicates,
however, there are national nuances to that translation.
The author notes that this book was a long time in the making, but it was
worth the wait. Fourcade gives us a notably well-written, deeply researched
1
This observation comes from Alexander Gerschenkron (1978), ‘Samuelson’s Text in Soviet Russia’,
Journal of Economic Literature, 16, 563.
Economists and societies 753
and analytically penetrating account of the social role of economics in three

countries over the course of a century. Although she traces the evolution of the
discipline over time, her chief concern is to outline and explain the differences
in economics, as it has been practised, across these three nations. Her central
thesis is that the development of economics was shaped by an institutional
logic distinctive to each country and closely related to the character of their
states and markets. In her evocative terms ‘economic knowledge as well as [its]
vocabularies, practical logics, and forms of explanation . . . are culturally situated
conceptualizations for imagining the social order and their institutionally
embedded practices’ (p. 15).
Thus, the USA developed a discipline seen by its practitioners as a scientific
pursuit founded on mathematics, focused on what markets can accomplish and
anchored in the research universities from which so many Nobel Prize winners
have emerged. In Britain, until recently, economics was a pragmatic endeavour
entrusted to public-minded elites concentrated in a few academic enclaves, con-
cerned not only about advancing knowledge but also about securing a wider social
welfare. In France, economics suffered from its academic position as an adjunct to
law, emerging late as a practical exercise under the tutelage of the state, whose engin-
eers adapted it for use in the modernization projects of the Fifth Republic.
Recognizable though it will be to scholars of economic thought, this brief
summary does less than full justice to Fourcade’s wide-ranging account.
Informed by dozens of interviews and a broad reading of multiple literatures,
her analysis takes us on a rapid but sure-footed journey through the development
of the discipline during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her formulations
capture well the general character of the national literatures and the roles econo-
mists have played in public policy-making. With incisive insight, she illuminates
some of the more paradoxical elements in the story, noting, for instance, how
British economists, entrenched in a cozy realm of elite culture, nonetheless
devoted considerable attention to issues of inequality, inspired either by the tra-
dition of noblesse oblige that influenced John Maynard Keynes or by an acute
awareness of the dilemmas posed by a society highly structured by social class.
Likewise, she observes that the reluctance of the French state to promote econo-
mics as an academic discipline ultimately fostered an intellectual pluralism see-
mingly improbable under such an étatiste regime.
Because Fourcade writes with an exceptional methodological consciousness,
her work will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, whether or not they
have any special interest in economics, for its effort to describe how national cul-
tures tied to distinctive institutional logics condition how knowledge is produced
and used in each country. She elaborates a method of ‘critical organized compari-
son’ built on the contention that, if we want to understand how national cultures
condition outcomes, we need to focus on the processes and mechanisms through
which they operate. The book does so by examining the historical conditions that
helped to crystallize the very idea of what economics is, with special emphasis on
the academic environment in which the discipline developed and on the ways in
which governmental practices in each country encouraged particular approaches
to the economy.
There is delicious irony in a project designed to show how the most hard-
headed of the social sciences is culturally conditioned, and anyone who still
believes that economic knowledge advances independently of social context
should read this book. However, explaining precisely how social context con-
ditions the production of knowledge is not an easy task, and this book succeeds
in doing so more in some ways than in others. Fourcade is most convincing when
showing how economics developed as a profession in these three countries. We
can see how the centrality of research universities to the development of Ameri-
can economics might lead to the emphasis on economics as a form of science on
one side of the Atlantic, whereas those teaching future civil servants in the poli-
tics, philosophy and economics curriculum of Oxford might cultivate more prac-
tical understandings.
What is somewhat more contentious is how national context shapes the content
of economics as a discipline. In a marvellous introductory chapter, Fourcade
describes in general terms what it means to say that ‘economics is a product of
culture’ (p. 16). Building on the longstanding observation that economic science
developed in tandem with the modern state, she contends that variations across
states in the practices of political governance led to national variations in how
economists saw themselves and the purposes of their discipline, ultimately inspir-
ing different styles of reasoning. From this perspective, the character of knowledge
is conditioned by the practical involvement of actors within institutions. As that
involvement varies, so will the knowledge they produce. The research practices
of economists, in particular, are built upon culturally specific assumptions
about the role and competences of the state and on the role economists themselves
are accorded within different economic orders. Economics is thus the product of
what Fourcade describes here as a set of national institutional logics.
In broad terms, the case the book makes for this perspective is persuasive and
pioneering, and it seems slightly unfair to ask more of such a well-realized work.
However, Fourcade says relatively little about the content of the economic
research in these three nations and how that evolves over time. In the concluding
table summarizing the comparison, only one of nine categories is devoted to
‘intellectual patterns’. Where Fourcade touches on those patterns, her obser-
vations are tantalizing and plausible. She associates some of the dominant
themes in each country’s economics with its national preoccupations after the
Second World War. Thus, the American drive for economic and military supre-
macy encourages research on growth theory and the game theories central to
nuclear warfare. The demands of modernization through national planning con-

dition the development of price theory and microeconomics in France, whereas
the influential British work on welfare economics can be seen as a concomitant of
national concerns about issues of redistribution. However, the intellectual ambi-
tion of the work inclines the reader to want even more about the national content
of economics than the book provides. Just how deeply did the institutional logics
of these nations condition the terms in which economists argued and what were
the limits to the influence of those logics? To answer such questions, Fourcade
would have to delve even more deeply into the history of economic thought
than she does here.
At a theoretical level, however, this book raises fascinating questions about the
constitution and effects of national cultures. Fourcade sees the features of
national context that influence the direction of economics as more than
matters of context: they are manifestations of national cultures. For those of us
who have long wondered what national cultures are, Fourcade supplies a particu-
lar kind of answer. They are logics generated by complexes of institutions oper-
ating across multiple fields that include those of the state, the universities and
the economy. In many respects, this is a much more satisfying formulation
than simpler conceptions that associate culture with particular sets of attitudes
or ways of doing things. But the concept of a ‘logic’ as used here hides as
much as it reveals. In Fourcade’s deft analysis, which avoids high theory in
order to stay commendably close to the empirics, those logics are illustrated
rather than set out systematically. Institutions provide frameworks for action
and orientations for the courses of action that economists choose, and the
state looms large as the fundamental factor whose projects condition the insti-
tutional order as a whole. But, with a few exceptions, these are logics that
operate lightly. There is little here that one could associate with the structuralism
of Althusser or even of Foucault. Fourcade shows how these institutional logics
have effects, and her account deserves to be seen as ‘cultural’ since those effects
operate, for the most part, through the ways in which institutional contexts
provide the meanings that actors associate with their endeavours. But it is a
measure of the power of the analysis that one wants to know even more about
how nations develop such logics and the limits to how they condition knowledge
or action.
In particular, it would be interesting to know more about the ways in which
the logics of national culture interact with the international marketplace of
ideas, which, as Fourcade notes, has also been important to the development
of economics. Without Keynes, for instance, post-war American economics
would have been a very different enterprise, but it seems clear that the Americans
adapted his ideas to their own purposes. Conversely, the recent era of globaliza-
tion seems to have had a profound impact on the discipline of economics in
Europe, potentially loosening the grip of national logics, but perhaps only
because national purposes too have changed in its wake. In short, Fourcade
has produced, not only an excellent account of how national context shapes
an important field of research, but also a tantalizing approach to the problem
of understanding how national cultures are constituted. Like all pioneering
works, the book raises as many questions as it answers, but it provides a basis
for thinking in new terms, not only about economics, but also about the consti-
tution of society. As a result, Fourcade shows how much potential lies in com-
parative sociology and one can only hope that others will follow in her
footsteps towards cross-national comparisons that inquire further into the
social relationships that are constitutive of national cultures and what they can
and cannot explain.
Geoffrey M. Hodgson
The Business School, University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, UK
Correspondence: g.m.hodgson@herts.ac.uk
1. Introduction
This book is a comparative study of the evolution of economics as a discipline in
three countries: France, Great Britain and the USA. Its main thesis is that different
paths of doctrinal evolution are ‘a product of culture’ (p. 16) and also deeply
affected by the institutional make-up of the country involved. This is a worthy
project and a plausible argument. In pursuit of its aim, the book covers a great
deal of important and interesting material. There are vivid accounts of the
spread of mathematics in economics since the 1950s, and of some of the other
key changes in the discipline.
But although this book is a rich source of information, regrettably its basic
argument rests on an undeveloped theoretical foundation. The familiarly proble-
matic concept of culture is inadequately explored or defined. There is insufficient
reference to the conceptual literature on institutions and that concept remains
underdeveloped. We are left with rather vague allusions to a ‘market culture’ in
the USA, to the peculiar ‘structure of the British state’ and to dirigisme in
France. These thumbnail sketches of the cultural and institutional characteristics
of the three countries lack nuance and depth. Such weaknesses partly account
for the failure of the book’s principal argument. In addition the book is
marred by misleading statements and errors of fact, some of which I shall
detail later below.
2. Characterizing cultural and institutional differences

Fourcade argues ‘that it is the centrality of market institutions to U.S. political
culture and institutional makeup that has given the practice of economics in
this country its particular character’ (p. 8). But it is rather a simplistic description
and criterion of demarcation to regard the USA as simply market dominated. It is
also dominated politically and economically by huge business corporations
(Dahl, 1982; Simon, 1991). Furthermore, since the Second World War, military
expenditure in the USA is among the highest of developed economies (Galbraith,
1969). The USA is a corporate and militaristic, as well as a market, society.
Market norms are also important in the British cultural and institutional
make-up. In the period from when Marshall wrote his Principles (1890) to
when Keynes produced his General Theory (1936), the British economy was as
market-driven as the USA. The heyday of British economics was in the context
of a capitalist market economy.
Fourcade writes: ‘The imperialism of American economics is rooted in a deep
moral belief that no one stands outside of economic rationality . . . and money is
the primary medium through which economic rationality expresses itself’
(p. 93). This is an odd formulation. The majority of American (and other) main-
stream economists assume that agents are rational utility-maximizers. It is mislead-
ing to describe this as a ‘deep moral belief’. While assumptions are affected by
ideological stances and can have moral implications, the assumption of rationality
is more axiomatic than moral. The rationality assumption encompasses a number
of different possible moral stances, including versions of altruism and even
Marxism (Collard, 1978; Roemer, 1982; Gintis, 2007), as well as self-interested or
self-regarding behaviour. It is also misleading to state that rationality is fundamen-
tally about money. The rationality assumption is typically framed in terms of utility,
although money is sometimes used as its proxy in experimental and other settings.
In another passage on US economics, Fourcade emphasizes marginalism: ‘In a
context of political incertitude and relative lack of autonomy of the intellectual
sphere, marginal analysis came to be regarded as a safe and attractive research strat-
egy by American economists’ (p. 79). Here the claim is that the predisposition to
marginalism was greater in the USA and due to greater political uncertainty and
less autonomy. The empirical and causal claims here are both dubious. Why, for
instance, was there not more marginalism in France, where from the 1860s until
the 1960s there was more political uncertainty and less intellectual autonomy?
And how does her argument square with a relatively greater political stability in
mainland Britain, which has suffered no invasion since 1688 and no internal strife
since 1746, and which was also the crucible of the Marshallian marginal analysis?
She also makes the claim that marginalism was a defence against radicalism:
‘marginal analysis and statistics were [regarded as - G.M.H.] the best defense
against the perceived evils of radical political partisanship’ (p. 80). This ignores
the contrary fact that many champions of the marginal analysis, from Léon
Walras, through Philip Wicksteed and Oskar Lange to Kenneth Arrow, have
been socialists or radicals.
Fourcade turns to ‘the structure of the British state’ but does little to elaborate
on the peculiarly British class structure and the role of the southeast-centred
British Establishment. She alludes to the ‘peripheral position’ of research insti-
tutes and the separation of both institutions and individuals from the ‘policy
process’ (p. 177). She argues that ‘the structure of the British state and its
relationship to society’ excluded outsiders from economic policy-making pos-
itions and thus ‘incited them to present their ideas directly to the public’
(p. 180). Yet we are given no substantive evidence that economic journalism is
or was any more prominent in Britain than elsewhere. There are large swathes
of economists in other countries that are excluded from policy-making positions.
Her arguments here remain at the level of conjecture, without detailed empirical
evidence.
Generally, the cultural and institutional conditions are profoundly under-
specified. Nowhere does she discuss what may be regarded as a key difference:
the different legal statuses of universities in the UK, USA and France. We are
told that the French system was centrally governed, in contrast to the ‘Anglo-
Saxon world, where universities largely governed themselves’ (p. 56). But the
source of these differences in legal structures is ignored.
Not only is there a silence on these vital legal matters, some misleading state-
ments give the impression that her knowledge of the key facts is deficient. For
example, she tells us that the older UK universities ‘began as private corporations’
(p. 46). True. But they not only began as private corporations—they still are. Not
only the older but also all UK universities are private corporations. The corporate
form, which originated in the medieval English law, includes charities and univer-
sities. Both business and university corporations receive formal legal recognition
(via registration or a Charter of Incorporation) from the state, granting some
autonomy and the right to act as a singular legal person.
The corporate form also exists in France and the USA. But not all universities
are corporations in these other countries. Most universities are corporations in
the USA, but there is a crucial difference between private and state (not
federal) institutions. In contrast, in France (as in several other countries in
Continental Europe) most universities are owned arms of the state and their
employees are civil servants. This is a vital difference.
Neither are we told by Fourcade how different national governments exert
power over the universities in their territory. Such powers of leverage depend
on legal forms. In the USA, the Federal government influences universities
largely by channelling research revenues, often related to defence. Otherwise
both state and private universities have a relative large degree of autonomy from
the Federal government. There is some leverage by state governments by finance
for student bursaries and other grants.
In contrast, despite their legal autonomy, the British government has exercised
considerable control over British universities since the Second World War.
(Control was from Westminster until devolution to Scotland and Wales in 1997.)
The state awards teaching and research grants; in return the universities agree to
comply to all sorts of detailed managerial, teaching assessment, research assessment
and other norms and procedures. In other respects, British universities retain a con-
siderable degree of autonomy, concerning promotions, salaries, teaching and the
curriculum. And British university teachers are not employees of the state.
In contrast, until recently (with some limited measures of decentralization in
the state sector, and the additional growth of some foundations and genuinely
private institutions) the French system has been under much greater central
control. French university teachers and researchers are employees of the state.
3. Some further difficulties

Any demonstration of the influence of different national cultures and insti-
tutional structures on the development of economics in different countries has
to deal with the following additional issues: (a) the possible influence of the doc-
trine found in one country on that of another, (b) variation of types of economics
within a particular national culture and (c) the changing character through the
time of a national type of economics, especially when corresponding develop-
mental changes in culture or institutions seem less obvious.
Concerning (a) the account in this book has significant deficiencies. For
example, although the influence of German economics in general and the
German historical school is briefly mentioned (pp. 4, 38– 39, 58, 65, 72), there
is not enough emphasis on the pre-eminence and global influence of Germany
in economics prior to the First World War. In her fullest statement on the
topic, Fourcade writes: ‘Between the 1850s and the 1890s, Americans seeking
advanced training went to Germany for their doctoral education’ (p. 65). But
she does not cite the important study by Jurgen Herbst (1965, p. 1) which dis-
cusses this academic migration over a much longer period: ‘Between the years
1820 and 1920 nearly nine thousand American students set sail for Europe to
enter the lecture halls, seminars, and laboratories of German universities’. This
migration included a number of leading British and American economists
(Hodgson, 2001). She also fails to note that fluency in German was regarded as
a requirement for any accomplished scientist until at least the 1920s. The
nature and extent of the influence of German (and Austrian) economics on
America, Britain and France is under-explored.
Also concerning (a), there is an insufficient emphasis on the fact that because the
USA and Britain share a common language there has been a much stronger transfer
of ideas between the two countries. In contrast, France has until recently retained a
devotion to its own language that has restricted the influence of Anglo-American
economics, at least until the closing decades of the twentieth century.
An example of the kind of problem that arises under (b) is how to explain the
different dispositions towards free-market policies in different leading depart-
ments of economics in the USA. The University of Chicago places the strongest
emphasis on rationality, equilibrium, economics imperialism and free-market
policies. But other leading departments, such as Harvard and Columbia, are
more Keynesian or interventionist.
Fourcade writes: ‘How can we explain sociologically the intellectual distinc-
tiveness of Chicago economics within the broader U.S. field?’ (p. 96). Her
answer is brief and tentative: ‘Ultimately, Chicago’s distinctiveness may have
had more to do with the lesser importance of foreigners in the department, the
intellectual legacies of influential teachers of extremely long tenure (Knight,
Friedman, Stigler, Becker), as well as with consistent patterns of recruitment
and socialization through courses on price theory’ (p. 96). But she gives no com-
parative evidence to sustain these arguments. Absent are historical data on
foreign recruitment, tenure longevity or curriculum differences between
leading US departments. The vital task of explaining internal variety in one
country is left incomplete. And if foreign recruitment, the influence of longstand-
ing professors or the nature of the taught curriculum is so important, then this
significantly qualifies the attempt to explain the nature of economics in terms
of national culture or institutions.
Concerning the Chicago-type ‘imperialist’ spread of neo-classical ideas to
cover phenomena previously examined by other disciplines, we are told that
this ‘imperialist expansion of modern economics is largely an American develop-
ment’ (p. 92). This overlooks the fact that some theoretical roots of economics’
imperialism lie elsewhere. Influenced by Austrian and other economic ideas,
the British economist Lionel Robbins (1932) redefined economics in terms of a
core set of assumptions that were applied to phenomena outside markets and
business. After Paul Samuelson (1948) imported Robbins’s definition of the dis-
cipline as the ‘science of choice’, the Chicago project to imperialize the territory of
other social sciences got under way (Becker, 1976).
Concerning (c), Fourcade identifies ‘three major phases’ in the development of
economics: ‘The period from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s was domi-
nated by methodological debates and the automatization of economics from
neighbouring fields . . . . The 1930s through the 1960s witnessed its emergence as
a technique of government . . . . Finally, since the end of the “Fordist” era, we
have witnessed a massive expansion of business applications of economics’
(p. 2). Even if this periodization is correct, then we are required to explain how the
phase transitions were coordinated internationally. Little explanation is given.
Is the periodization correct? The idea that economics up to the 1920s was
‘dominated by methodological debates’ is far too strong. Although the explicit
methodological differences between (say) Malthus and Ricardo were important,
economics prior to the 1930s was also concerned with practical and policy ques-
tions. Furthermore, prior to the 1930s, economists paid some but relatively little
attention to the definition of the discipline. Alfred Marshall (1890, p. 1) was
content to define economics loosely as ‘the study of mankind in the ordinary
business of life . . . connected with the attainment and with the use of the material
requisites of wellbeing’ and this or similar definitions were very widely accepted
by other economists, both orthodox and heterodox. Contrary to Fourcade, there
was relatively little energy expended by economists on attempts to ‘autonomize’
their discipline. The boundary disputes became more significant in the 1930s, in
Fourcade’s second period, when Talcott Parsons (1937) redefined sociology partly
in response to Robbins’s (1932) redefinition of economics.
4. Some errors and misleading statements

Some errors [such as ‘the sterling’ instead of ‘Sterling’ (p. 169)] are minor and of
little analytical consequence. Others are more serious. For example, in character-
izing the institutional structure of the US economy, she writes: ‘The Sherman Act
implied that markets are not simply the structure of the American economy: they
are its law’ (p. 36). But the Sherman Act protects competition in exchange rather
than establishing market institutions proper. Not all commodity exchange takes
place in market institutions (Hodgson, 1988, 2008; Mirowski, 2007). The purpose
of the Sherman Act is to remove monopolies and other impediments to compe-
tition in some but not all areas of the economy. This does not necessarily mean
either markets proper or perfect competition.
Few lawyers or economists would agree that anti-trust laws legitimize the idea
that ‘oligopoly is the most reasonable and realistic approximation of the ideal of
perfect competition’ (p. 37). Even in introductory textbooks, I know of no case
where perfect competition is treated as an adequate approximation to oligopoly.
American ‘institutionalist economics’ is said to be in existence in 1895
(p. 133). Yet the term was not invented until 1916 and Thorstein Veblen (the
here unmentioned founder of institutionalism) did not make his major theoreti-
cal breakthroughs until 1898 and after. The same institutional economics is said
to suffer a ‘rapid demise after 1945’ (p. 83). But institutional economics retained
some prominence until the 1970s, and still survives today. Simon Kuznets and
Gunnar Myrdal won Nobel Prizes in 1971 and 1974, respectively. They were insti-
tutional economists in the tradition of Veblen, Commons and Mitchell.
Turning to UK universities, we are told of ‘Marshall’s struggles against the

economic historians at Cambridge’ (p. 148). This repeats the false myth that
Marshal opposed economic history and the historical school (Hodgson, 2001,
2005). Marshall’s principal doctrinal struggle in Cambridge was against one
rather than several economic historians—namely William Cunningham. In her
discussion (p. 150) of Marshall’s promotion of some mathematics in the econ-
omics curriculum, there is no mention of Marshall’s plentiful and repeated reser-
vations about the excessive use of mathematics in economics (Hodgson, 2001,
2005). Consequently, the impact of mathematics on UK economics in the
post-war period lagged behind that in the USA until the impact of the Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the 1990s. Fourcade also omits any discussion of
the important impact of the RAE on the recent development of UK economics.
Fourcade tells us that postgraduate training in the UK is ‘fairly hands-off ’,
which partly reflects ‘the generally intimate nature of the British college
system’ (p. 144). But there is no such a thing as ‘the British college system’.
There is a variety of contrasting systems in different universities. Fourcade may
be referring to the Oxbridge system where colleges are largely (but not entirely)
oriented towards undergraduates, and postgraduates are often supervised
outside the colleges. But Oxbridge is atypical of British universities as a whole.
She also misses the observation that PhD training in economics in Britain has
been largely by individual supervision of dissertations, in contrast to the substan-
tial taught component in the US system.
Fourcade writes: ‘In contrast to the United States-, where elevation to a pro-
fessorship has been part of the normal development of academic careers, in
England few people ever attained such status. Even today, many remain in
inferior grades their entire lives or receive this supreme academic honour late
in their career . . . and rarely outside of LSE/Oxbridge’ (p. 143). While it is true
that a greater proportion of academics in the US system become full professors
than in British universities, it is untrue that ‘few people’ attain this status in
the UK. Furthermore, contrary to her statement that professorships are ‘rarely
outside of LSE/Oxbridge’ they are more frequent in other British universities.
When it is mentioned (pp. 46, 49, 50, 183), there is little to counter the false
impression that London is a singular university body. The University of London
is a federal institution, founded in 1836, comprising 19 separate university insti-
tutions and 12 research institutes. For example, Imperial College and University
College are part of the University of London and have globally prestigious depart-
ments of economics; but they are not the LSE. Furthermore, the federal University
of London does not incorporate another 10 additional separate (but unmentioned)
universities founded in London since the 1990s. All these nuances are missing.
Fourcade refers in a discussion of ‘the British university’ to the ‘older univer-
sities (Oxford, Cambridge, and London)’ (p. 49). But Scotland is part of Britain.
She overlooks four historic and surviving Scottish universities much older than
any in London, namely St Andrews (founded 1413), Glasgow (founded 1451),
Aberdeen (founded 1495) and Edinburgh (founded 1583). No adequate
account of British culture and institutions can ignore the way in which the UK
is fractured horizontally by class, and geographically by four different nations.
Sadly these do not figure in her account.
5. Conclusion
It is perhaps no accident that this book appears in an academic context where
economists are trained to be mathematicians but discouraged from taking any
interest in their doctrinal or institutional history. And just as economists are
not required to read sociology, sociologists are not obliged to master much of
economics or its history. Any ambitious interdisciplinary venture of the kind
can quite easily fall through the cracks between the regrettably insular academic
disciplines of today.
References
Becker, G. S. (1976) The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, Chicago, IL, University of
Chicago Press.
Collard, D. (1978) Altruism and Economy: A Study in Non-Selfish Economics, Oxford,
Martin Robertson.
Dahl, R. A. (1982) Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.
Galbraith, J. K. (1969) The New Industrial State, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Gintis, H. (2007) ‘A Framework for the Integration of the Behavioral Sciences’, Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, 30, 1 –16.
Herbst, J. (1965) The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the
Transfer of Culture, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.
Hodgson, G. M. (1988) Economics and Institutions: A Manifesto for a Modern Institutional
Economics, Cambridge, Polity Press/Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press.
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in Social Science, London/New York, NY, Routledge.
Hodgson, G. M. (2005) ‘Alfred Marshall versus the Historical School?’, Journal of Economic
Studies, 32, 331 –348.
Hodgson, G. M. (2008) ‘Markets’. In New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edn,
Basingstoke, Macmillan.
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Macmillan.
Mirowski, P. (2007) ‘Markets Come to Bits: Evolution, Computation and Markomata in
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Parsons, T. (1937) The Structure of Social Action, Vol. 2, New York, NY, McGraw-Hill.
Robbins, L. (1932) An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 1st edn,
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Socio-Economic Review (2010) 8, 747–764 doi:10.

Keywords: economic sociology, economics, professions, culture, institutions,

Economists and Societies (Fourcade, 2009) is a brilliant and fascinating book. It is

sociologists and philosophers such as Bourdieu, Foucault, Callon. Other references

neighbour’ (Fourcade, op. cit., p. 262) is currently experiencing a mighty trend

and analytically penetrating account of the social role of economics in three

nuclear warfare. The demands of modernization through national planning con-

2. Characterizing cultural and institutional differences

3. Some further difficulties

4. Some errors and misleading statements

Turning to UK universities, we are told of ‘Marshall’s struggles against the

Marshall, A. (1890) Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume, 1st edn, London,

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