Defining Economics: Robbins's Essay in Theory and Practice
36 Pages Posted: 13 Mar 2007
Date Written: March 11, 2007
Abstract
Robbins's Essay was significant in many ways, but especially in giving economics a definition that came to dominate the professional literature. Our goal in the present paper is to trace the reception of Robbins's definition of economics as, to use a useful abbreviation, the science of scarcity. This definition was analytic, in that it identified an ascpect of behavior, and it laid a foundation that could be seen as justifying not only the narrowing of economic theory to the theory of constrained maximization or rational choice but also the "imperialism" of economists' ventures into the fields of law, sociology and political science.
Though Robbins's definition is often presented as self-evidently correct, the developments that it has been used to support were all keenly contested. In the 1940s and 1950s, the role of mathematical theorizing based on optimizing models was challenged on several fronts. The use and even legitimacy of economic imperialism were questioned by both economists and scholars working in the colonized disciplines. We attempt to trace out the reception, diffusion, and contesting of the definition, focusing on explicit discussions of the definition in the academic journals and in economics textbooks
Keywords: definition of economics, choice, scarcity
JEL Classification: A1, B2, B4
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation