7 - The marginal revolution and the neo-classical triumph

Summary

It is generally accepted that the British classical economists of the first half of the nineteenth century constituted an identifiable school of economic thought. They shared a distinctive framework of economic ideas, shaped by a particular set of axioms and theories and generally characterised by a strong bias towards economic policies favouring economic individualism and laissezfaire. Whether this school of thought constituted a ‘scientific community’ in the sense that T. S. Kuhn uses the term in his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions or whether it is better described as a ‘pre-paradigm school’ may be open to question. In Kuhn's view a scientific community consists of the practitioners of a scientific specialty who share a common paradigm. ‘To an extent unparalleled in most other fields they have undergone similar educations and professional initiations; in the process they have absorbed the same technical literature and drawn many of the same lessons from it. Usually the boundaries of that standard literature mark the limit of a scientific subject matter.’

Certainly nineteenth-century economists drew their basic assumptions and techniques from the same textual sources – Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Nassau Senior and John Stuart Mill being the main links in a clearly perceptible continuity of thought – though there was as yet no formally recognised education as an economist. The doubt, however, is not whether the nineteenth century community of economists shared ‘similar educations and professional initiations’ but whether they were the practitioners of a scientific specialty.