Abstract
This chapter outlines Ludwik Fleck’s philosophy and sociology of scientific knowledge and employs that approach to provide a new perspective on Arthur Cecil Pigou’s economic thinking relative to Alfred Marshall. The various characteristics and attributes of Pigou’s life and contributions that are identified in Chaps. 2 and 3 are considered from the perspective of Fleck’s notion of ‘thought collective’ and the related, but different, notion of ‘thought style’. These distinctions are then employed to develop an alternative and largely consistent way of understanding the concept of ‘Marshallian’ economics and to identify mechanisms to account for the ‘Marshallian’ thought style that evolved under Pigou’s influence. In this way, the Fleckian framework provides a means to interpret adaptation and modification in the ‘Marshallian’ thought style as part of an evolutionary process.
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Notes
- 1.
Claus Zittel (2012) presents a comprehensive survey of Fleck’s concept of a thought style. He argues that scholars have associated Fleck’s use of the term with Karl Mannheim’s (1929) use of it in his earlier landmark work Ideologie und Utopi. However, Zittel, tracing the use of similar terms by other notable scholars (e.g., he refers to Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, and Leonardo Olschki), argues that the notion of style in thought was adopted and absorbed by extremely different movements in the 1920s, and that Fleck’s adoption of the term was quite unique.
- 2.
Amongst Fleck’s most notable accomplishments was the development of a vaccine for typhus conducted under primitive conditions whilst detained by German forces in Buchenwald concentration camp (Fleck was Jewish) during the Second World War. After the war he held several positions in European hospitals and universities in microbiology and immunology. He took a position at the Israel Institute for Biological Research in 1956. Fleck died in 1961 at the age of 64.
- 3.
It should also be pointed out that similarities noted between Kuhn’s ideas and those found in earlier works by Michael Polanyi, such as Science, Faith, and Society (1946) and The Logic of Liberty (1951), led to claims that Kuhn had not properly acknowledged the influence of Polanyi’s work (e.g., see Moleski 2006). Hagner (2012) provides a comparison between Fleck’s and Polanyi’s ideas.
- 4.
Applications of Kuhnian and Lakatosian frameworks to examine episodes of economic knowledge production, for example, have diminished. This has been attributed to failure of the theories to convincingly respond to a variety of criticisms from economic methodologists and historians of economic thought. For a review and assessment of this the reader is directed to (Drakopoulos and Karayiannis 2005).
- 5.
Many sociocultural explanations of knowledge production have emerged from a variety of disciplines since the turn of the twenty-first century that historians of economic thought have drawn on for making the case for particular schools of thought in economics. Some recent examples include McLure (2007), who draws on Scott Frickel and Neil Gross’s notion of Scientific Intellectual Movements to examine the Paretian School in Italy, and Robert Cord (2011), who draws on a framework pioneered by Jack Morrell (1972) and formalised by Gerald Geison (1981) to interpret the Keynesian revolution.
- 6.
Blute and Armstrong (2011) provide a useful comparison of the range of contemporary grand theories of the scientific and scholarly process that have emerged recently within the discipline of sociology (Abbott 2001; Blute 2010; Collins 1998; Drori et al. 2003; Frickel and Gross 2005; Latour and Woolgar 1986 [1976]; MacKenzie 2006), and the discipline of the philosophy of science (Bunge 2003; Fuller 2006; Hull 1988; Ziman 2000).
- 7.
Nominalism is the philosophical idea that, although general and abstract terms exist, universals and abstract objects do not exist. There are, therefore, at least two forms of nominalism: the denial of the existence, and therefore the reality of, abstract objects; or the denial of the existence, and therefore the reality, of universal properties (Rodriguez-Pereyra 2015).
- 8.
Constructivism is a theory that views individuals as constructing their own understanding and knowledge of the world, via their experience and reflection on that experience.
- 9.
Groenewegen (2012) considers Joseph Nicholson, Alfred Flux, Charles Sanger, Sydney Chapman, John Clapham, David MacGregor, Frederick Lavington, Walter Layton, Charles Fay, and Gerald Shove in his recent study.
- 10.
This presents a supplementary way of considering the professionalisation thesis presented by Maloney (1985). The efforts of Marshall and Cambridge academic economists striving for orthodoxy in both intellectual and public arenas arise from the social structure and relations in the wider dynamics of the Fleckian system of dependent epistemic relations. In this case, during the time when the discipline of economics underwent ‘professionalisation’, many sociological groupings of economists formed, each with different perspectives of the problems to be solved and each developing different thought styles. What specialist economists had in common were challenges to what was being accepted as economic fact by other general experts and non-experts. The Fleckian framework, therefore, becomes more consistent with the arguments of Tribe (2001) who argues that a wider explanation for the professionalisation of economics can be found outside of that centred on Marshall’s activities at Cambridge and in Britain that was central to Maloney’s (1985) argument.
- 11.
Roger E. Backhouse (2006) provides an account of the various perspectives that have developed as to the nature and understanding of the so-called Keynesian revolution.
- 12.
The various theoretical controversies Pigou was involved in during the interwar years, including the ‘cost’ controversy, have previously been discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3. See Aslanbeigui and Oakes (2002, 2009) for further detail regarding challenges to Pigou’s analysis of unemployment during the 1930s.
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Lovejoy Knight, K. (2018). The ‘Marshallian’ Thought Collective and Thought Style. In: A.C. Pigou and the 'Marshallian' Thought Style. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01018-8_4
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