Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Rational Economic Man
For better or worse, the beginnings of economics as a discipline supposedly
began with Adam Smith (June 5, 1723 to July 17, 1790) and publication of his
Wealth of Nations in 1776. Staunch devotees of a market economy often note,
with patriotic fervor, that the birth of economics is coincident with the begin-
nings of the United States, which was destined to provide the most aggres-
sive testing ground for these classically liberal ideas. Attention to economic
life, of course, goes back much further.
It is significant that Adam Smith was every inch a product of the
Enlightenment, which, over a period of three to five centuries, ushered in
an extended love affair with the notion that human analytical thought can,
among other things, uncover absolute truth—something that is impossible
through knowledge because knowledge is always relative and perpetually
outdated. This culminates a process marked by shifts in the dominant view
of Western society from reliance on faith to reliance on reason, from divine
revelation to empirical scientific discovery, and from the concentration of
human affairs within the realm of the transcendental and spiritual to the
realm of the secular and material.
As economic theory began to deviate from the Middle-Age doctrine of the
Divine Right of Kings, Western society experimented with the notion that
it could discover physical principles of the world, not simply by decree but
through observation and reason. The people who were experimenting with
economic theory also held the notion that they could structure their own
economic and political institutions to be responsive to the democratically
expressed will of the people, and that ruling institutions could be made to
serve the people, rather than the reverse.
Thousands of volumes have been written on all aspects of these powerful
ideas, and it is not our purpose to recreate the major tenets of intellectual
history. The important point is that, as a typical product of the times, eco-
nomic methodology became enamored from its outset with empirical scien-
tific method and thus preoccupied with the self-appointed task of becoming
a science.
Social philosophers of the 18th-century Enlightenment were so bedazzled
by the astounding scientific discoveries of the 17th century in astronomy,
physics, mathematics, plate tectonic geology, chemistry, and so on, that many
set off in a search for what was termed the universal “laws of motion” of
human behavior (the immutable “nature” of humans, if you will). Certainly,
the reasoning went, there must be deterministic laws for human behavior
that parallel Isaac Newton's law of gravity. As a species, we have always
harbored a fascination in playing with a novel, new toy.
And the chosen view of science is part of the problem. Although human-
kind, having spread throughout the globe, is perhaps the most adaptable
species in the history of planet Earth, that very success is proving to be a
 
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