This paper forms part of a research project investigating conceptions of the relationship between micro-level self-seeking agent behaviour and the desirability or otherwise of the resulting macro-level social outcomes in the history of economics. I identify two kinds of conservative rhetorical strategy, characterised by reductionism, and by holism plus an invisible hand mechanism, respectively. The present paper extends this study to Malthus, focusing on the various editions of his Essay on Population and his Summary View of the Principle of Population. (...) Like the reductionist (Friedman, Lucas) and holistic (Smith, Hayek) proponents of laissez-faire, Malthus, too, is a defender of ‘the present order of things’ and an advocate of dependence on spontaneous forces. Malthus starts out within the eighteenth-century providentialist paradigm epitomised by Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart, but he later abandoned providentialism, adopting a more reductionist standpoint. Like Smith and Stewart, he takes a conservative political stance and opposes radical reform of society. But in taking up the arguments of the leading reformers of the day, Godwin and Condorcet, he is drawn by the logic of his argument to a position very far removed from Smith’s stoic optimism. The weapon he deploys against the reformers is the principle of population, by means of which he is able to portray the present state of society as something natural, eternal and inevitable, something in common with the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Though a potent weapon against the utopians, at the same time the principle of population undermines providentialism In the First Essay he tries to mitigate this by presenting a theodicy to reconcile his theory with a version of providentialism, but within weeks of publication he begins work on its replacement, a secular and reductionist argument that individual self-interest can guide us to socially desirable outcomes. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to explore Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of social science. To this end, the paper sheds light on the main epistemological presuppositions that undergird Bourdieu’s defence of reflexive sociology as a scientific endeavour. The predominant view in the literature is that, in most of his writings,Bourdieu has a tendency to embrace a positivist conception of social science. When examining Bourdieu’s conception of social science in more detail, however, it becomes clear that the assumption that he (...) remains trapped in a positivist paradigm does not do justice to the complexity of his multifaceted account of social science. In order to illustrate the complexity of Bourdieu’s conception of social science, the following analysis scrutinises ten epistemological tensions which can be found in Bourdieu’s writings on the nature of knowledge production. In view of these epistemological tensions, a more fine-grained picture emerges which demonstrates that Bourdieu invites,and indeed compels, us to reflect upon the complexity of the various tension-laden tasks posed by the pursuit of a critical social science. (shrink)

For many economists, including those who have made the most marked contribution to the development of the discipline, their work has to be understood in the context of the rhetorical strategy they were pursuing – what they wanted to persuade us of and how they wanted to do it. The paper identifies two fundamental rhetorical strategies of laissez-faire resting on entirely distinct ontological foundations. What distinguishes these two strategies is the way they articulate the individual with the general interest, how (...) they relate the micro to the macro. The two strategies discussed in the paper are characterised by the stance they take on a fundamental ontological issue, the way in which the things which appear to us in the world are related to the things or matters which compose them. A reductionist approach suggests that we can understand an entity at one level as a congeries. An entity in this view is just an aggregate of entities at a lower, substrate level – a purely external unity. The properties and behaviour of an entity can then be understood in terms of the properties and behaviour of the constituent lower-level components, taken in isolation. In this approach, phenomena at some level are regarded as having just the qualities enjoyed by its lower-level, substrate elements, writ large. The contrary, holistic, stance is to view the qualities of phenomena at one level as emergent at that level, and to assert that an entity can be understood as a product of the inter-relations between its component parts. We have, then, a pair of contrasted approaches: a polarity which is productive in the study of schools of thought, of competing methodologies, and of rhetorical strategies in economics. The paper applies this approach to the work of Smith, Keynes, Hayek, Lucas and Friedman. (shrink)