Hands D Wade
Department of Economics, University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA, 98416, USA.
Stud Hist Philos Sci. 2021 Aug;88:209-219. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.06.008. Epub 2021 Jul 2.
The history of modern economics abounds with pleas for more pluralism as well as pleas for more unification. These seem to be contradictory goals, suggesting that pluralism and unification are mutually exclusive, or at least that they involve trade-offs with more of one necessarily being traded off against less of the other. This paper will use the example of Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947) to argue that the relationship between pluralism and unification is often more complex than this simple dichotomy suggests. In particular, Samuelson's Foundations is invariably presented as a key text in the unification of modern economics during the middle of the twentieth century; and in many ways that is entirely correct. But Samuelson's unification was not at the theoretical (causal and explanatory) level, but rather at the purely mathematical derivational level. Although this fact is recognized in the literature on Samuelson, what seems to be less recognized is that for Samuelson, much of the motivation for this unification was pluralist in spirit: not to narrow scientific economics into one single theory, but rather to allow for more than one theory to co-exist under a single unified derivational technique. This hidden pluralism will be discussed in detail. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for more recent developments in economics.
现代经济学的历史充斥着对更多元化的呼吁以及对更多统一化的呼吁。这些似乎是相互矛盾的目标，这表明多元化和统一化是相互排斥的，或者至少表明它们涉及权衡，一种的增加必然要以另一种的减少为代价。本文将以保罗·萨缪尔森的《经济分析基础》（1947年）为例，论证多元化和统一化之间的关系往往比这种简单的二分法所表明的更为复杂。特别是，萨缪尔森的《基础》一直被视为20世纪中叶现代经济学统一化的关键文本；在许多方面，这是完全正确的。但萨缪尔森的统一并非在理论（因果和解释）层面，而是在纯粹的数学推导层面。尽管这一事实在关于萨缪尔森的文献中得到了认可，但似乎较少被认识到的是，对萨缪尔森来说，这种统一的许多动机在精神上是多元主义的：不是将科学经济学狭义化为单一理论，而是允许不止一种理论在单一统一的推导技术下共存。这种隐藏的多元主义将得到详细讨论。本文最后讨论了其对经济学最新发展的影响。
