A National Vocation

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-87
Author(s):  
Owain Lawson
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Trade Policies ◽  
Rational Development ◽  
Environmental Determinism ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
Bourgeois Culture ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Governing Institutions

Abstract This article writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic thought. Historians of Lebanon's postindependence period have emphasized how a narrow, elite “consortium” espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon's national vocation. This article reveals that engineers formed an influential and underexamined countercurrent advocating statist developmentalism. Engineer-bureaucrats saw the postindependence era as an opportunity to claim their profession's status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. By reinterpreting the consortium's environmental narrative of Lebanese history, the hydrological engineer Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. These efforts cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.

Conclusion

Tea War ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 273-282
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Liu
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Production ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Major Question ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Modern Economy ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Indian Tea

This concluding chapter synthesizes the various stories from the Chinese and Indian tea war into a handful of observations about history and historiography. First, this book has given substance to a reconceptualization of capitalism's history more flexible and globally oriented than past approaches. Second, this view from two marginal sites in rural Asia also illuminates new conclusions about the rise of the modern economy. In particular, there is evidence to support the hypothesis that putatively backwards and marginal social formations were at times more predisposed to industrial production than their metropolitan counterparts were. Third, beyond challenging the Orientalist categories of economic backwardness and tradition, this book has sought to account for their emergence through a critical history of political-economic thought. Finally, this book can only speculatively gesture in the direction of another major question, namely, the historical relationship between transnational competition and national ideology.

A connected history of political economy in Asia and Europe, ca 1750–1914

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Alessandro Stanziani
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
The North Atlantic ◽  
History Of Political Economy ◽  
Political Economic

The history of political-economic thought has been built up over the centuries with a uniform focus on European and North American thinkers. Intellectuals beyond the North Atlantic have been largely understood as the passive recipients of already formed economic categories and arguments. This view has often been accepted not only by scholars and observers in Europe but also in many other places such as Russia, India, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. In this regard, the articles included in this collection explicitly differentiate from this diffusionist approach (“born in Western Europe, then flowed everywhere else”).

2. The Nineteenth-Century Roots of Theoretical Traditions in Global Political Economy

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-51
Author(s):  
Matthew Watson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Trade Policies ◽  
Friedrich List ◽  
Global Political Economy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Origins

This chapter focuses on the historical origins and the subsequent intellectual lineage of the three core theoretical positions within contemporary global political economy (GPE): realism, liberalism, and Marxism. ‘Textbook GPE’ privileges nineteenth-century understandings of political economy when discussing the pre-history of its own field. This helps explains GPE's treatment of feminist scholarship within the textbooks; feminism remains largely marginalized from textbook GPE, presented as something of a postscript to avoid accusations of it having been omitted altogether rather than being placed centre stage in the discussion. The chapter then looks at how the nineteenth-century overlay operates in textbook GPE. To do so, it makes sense to concentrate in the first instance on the issue that did most to divide nineteenth-century economists: namely, the free trade policies resulting from the general ascendancy of laissez-faire ideology. The most celebrated of the critics, Friedrich List, is treated much more as a dependable authority figure in GPE than he is in the history of economic thought. Indeed, in textbook GPE, the disputes between realist and liberal positions is very often presented initially through an account of List's work, despite the pre-history of liberalism being much the longer of the two.

How Homo economicus lost her mind and how we can revive her

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter DeScioli
Keyword(s):  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Homo Economicus ◽  
Economic Theories ◽  
Target Article ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior

AbstractThe target article by Boyer & Petersen (B&P) contributes a vital message: that people have folk economic theories that shape their thoughts and behavior in the marketplace. This message is all the more important because, in the history of economic thought, Homo economicus was increasingly stripped of mental capacities. Intuitive theories can help restore the mind of Homo economicus.

Nikolay Sieber in the history of prerevolutionary Russian economic thought

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
L. D. Shirokorad
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Organic Synthesis ◽  
Marginal Utility ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Three Stages

This article shows how representatives of various theoretical currents in economics at different times in history interpreted the efforts of Nikolay Sieber in defending and developing Marxian economic theory and assessed his legacy and role in forming the Marxist school in Russian political economy. The article defines three stages in this process: publication of Sieber’s work dedicated to the analysis of the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital and criticism of it by Russian opponents of Marxian economic theory; assessment of Sieber’s work by the narodniks, “Legal Marxists”, Georgiy Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin; the decline in interest in Sieber in light of the growing tendency towards an “organic synthesis” of the theory of marginal utility and the Marxist social viewpoint.

To Understand the Informal (on the Book BY V. L. Tambovtsev “Economics of Informal Institutions”)

2015 ◽  
pp. 151-158
Author(s):  
A. Zaostrovtsev
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Informal Institutions ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Original Classification

The review considers the first attempt in the history of Russian economic thought to give a detailed analysis of informal institutions (IF). It recognizes that in general it was successful: the reader gets acquainted with the original classification of institutions (including informal ones) and their genesis. According to the reviewer the best achievement of the author is his interdisciplinary approach to the study of problems and, moreover, his bias on the achievements of social psychology because the model of human behavior in the economic mainstream is rather primitive. The book makes evident that namely this model limits the ability of economists to analyze IF. The reviewer also shares the author’s position that in the analysis of the IF genesis the economists should highlight the uncertainty and reject economic determinism. Further discussion of IF is hardly possible without referring to this book.

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