The formation of “Modern” Economics: Engineering and Ideology

Economics has always had two connected faces in its Western tradition. In Adam Smith's eighteenth century, as in John Stuart Mill's nineteenth, these might be described as the science of political economy and the art of economic governance. The former aimed to describe the workings of the economy and reveal its governing laws while the latter was concerned with using that knowledge to fashion economic policy. In the twentieth century these two aspects have more often been contrasted as positive and normative economics. The continuity of these dual interests masks differences in the way that economics has been both constituted and practiced in the twentieth century when these two aspects of economics became integrated in a particular way. Originally a verbally expressed body of scientific law-like doctrines and associated policy arts, in the twentieth century these two wings of economics became conjoined by a set of technologies routinely and widely used within the practice of economics in both its scientific and policy domains.[...]