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Economics Imperialism in Law and Economics

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Definition

Economics imperialism is a type of an interdisciplinary relation between the scientific discipline of economics and other disciplines of the social sciences. The disciplines that are often claimed to be “imperialized” by economics are sociology (see Granovetter and Swedberg 2001; Swedberg 1990), political science (see Hodgson 1994; Sigelman and Goldfarb 2012; Kuorikoski and Lehtinen 2010), anthropology (see Marchionatti and Cedrini 2016), geography (see Mäki and Marchionni 2010), and law (see Medema 2018; Davies 2010; Fink 2003). Hence, the law and economics movement is seen by some as one of the manifestations of the imperialism of economics in the social sciences (in this case – in legal scholarship). Below, I review the general debate on economics imperialism, and then I discuss the attempts to analyze law and economics as a case of economics imperialism.

Introduction

Recently, in the philosophy of science literature there is a discussion on scientific imperialism, of...

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Correspondence to Magdalena Małecka .

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Małecka, M. (2018). Economics Imperialism in Law and Economics. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_741-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_741-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-7883-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7883-6

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