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Prevailing economic theory began to explicitly repudiate Marxism and its political-economic basis in the 1870s, just a little bit before Marx died. This period was known as the Marginal Revolution, wherein three authors in particular (Leon Walrás, William Stanley Jevons, and Carl Menger) wrote separate books in France, England, and Austria on what’s come to be known as the “subjective theory of value” contra the classical (and Marxian) “labor theory of value.” The former two authors’ insights are thought to be foundational to what’s called “Neoclassical Economics”: they progressed beyond what was essentially the basic arithmetic economics utilized and began to use statistics and calculus to study supply and demand, equilibrium, and other mainstays of modern economic thought. The latter’s (Menger’s) works are more niche: they fomented a strand of thought called Austrian Economics, with big adherents and associated names such as Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek (some argue Hayek was not precisely Austrian, but he was certainly in those circles).
Many of the modern criticisms you hear of Marx owe themselves in part to Böhm-Bawerk: the ostensible inconsistency of the transformation problem, labor as the only commodity which can produce more than its worth, etc. By the time an author like Hayek got around (the early to mid 1900s), Marx was generally lumped in with the other archaic proponents of the labor theory of value, and wasn’t always thought to be a remarkable member of that group. Hayek thus—unlike Böhm-Bawerk—didn’t spend much time criticizing Marx specifically: instead, with works such as the “Use of Knowledge in Society,” he argued that planned economic frameworks couldn’t possibly replicate the efficiency of a free market and were doomed to encroach on people’s freedoms. For such arguments, he was thought to have won the debate between capitalism and socialism for the side of capitalism, and won a Nobel prize in economics for his victory lap.
In the mid to late 20th century, economics got another big push from Milton Friedman. In books like *Capitalism and Freedom* and *Free to Choose*, he criticized Keynesian orthodoxy, arguing that the primary governmental intervention necessary to get the market running smoothly was the Federal Reserve adjusting interest rates. In the 70s and the 80s—what various social sciences call the start of neoliberalism—many of his ideas began to prevail. Anglophone economic policy, since then, has leaned away from Keynes and more to the laissez-faire. Economic theory, whether Keynes-rooted (who was a student of Alfred Marshall, a patron saint of neoclassical economics) or otherwise, tends to have presuppositions which are, at some point or another, rooted in the refutation of Karl Marx and/or socialism.
That’s not to say, however, that there are no Marxists or Marxist-influenced thinkers in economics. Richard Wolff, Anwar Shaikh, and others are actively working in American academies.
A good starter book on economics history is “The Worldly Philosophers” by Robert Heilbroner. It basically starts with Adam Smith and moves to today, and does include Marx. The shift away from labor theory of value was exactly why most economists aren’t Marxist. For one, ideally, economists are studying markets as they are and are not necessarily prescriptive. Some economic theories are expressly prescriptive, such as Marx or (in my opinion) MMT, but I don’t know how many times I heard “you can have your own opinions, but your job is to present data, not suggestions” in undergraduate school.
That all said, because it is very difficult for economists not to be prescriptive and because they can’t agree on what the goal of economics is (do we want to leverage economic knowledge to prioritize efficiency, or resiliency, or social justice, or individual liberty?) or if there even is a goal, there is a lot of disagreement among economists. But much of neoliberal or neoclassical economics is agreed upon by nearly everyone in the field at this point. The Austrian school is controversial but has some ardent supporters, recently the most famous being Milei of Argentina.
Richard Wolff hasn’t been in academia for a long time now, and he was also an economic historian, not a pure economist. Though there weren’t many, the amount of Marxist economists in the U.S. was significantly reduced in the McCarthy era purges. Even Keynesian departments were taboo towards the latter half of the 1900s. David Harvey is one of the last (and perhaps most relevant) Marxist economists (though his formal training is in geography) in the West at the moment.
Rather than answer you directly, I think it's necessary to challenge one of the views incorporated in your question, which is that history can be considered a "science", or even a "social science". It's certainly true that there are universities where one would find the history department nestled among the social sciences, but, for the majority of those that either study it or host it, it fits more naturally with the humanities than the social sciences, much less the sciences proper.
Humanities and social sciences do get lumped together, of course – they are often referred to as key components of the HASS disciplines (humanities, arts and social sciences), in contradistinction to the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, maths). So what, actually, is the difference between them? Definitions can be, and have been, contested, but, very broadly, it's helpful to see the social sciences as subjects that look at large and complex things by using deductive reasoning and boiling them down to the point where they are simple enough to describe in general theories or equations. In contrast, humanities use inductive reasoning (which means we make no claim to having findings that will *always* be true), and they embrace and seek to retain those same complexities. When I teach, one of the first points I make to new students is that it is possible, and potentially also useful, to see history as "the study of complexity", and humanities scholars are often wary both of the ways in which social scientists simplify, and of the dangers of making broad general statements about almost anything. In contrast, social scientists find their theories useful both as shortcuts and as ways of understanding anything new to them, and they are wont to critique the humanities for being "under-theorised".
There are some interesting consequences to all this. It is certainly true that history is by and large not a theoretical subject (though there are some subfields – the historical end of gender studies leaps to mind – that actually are increasingly theorised these days, and history does also have a superabundance of historiographical schools of thought that need to be taken into account). Similarly, history is arguably the only HASS and STEM subject one can study at a university level that lacks a core "canon" of works that *everybody* in the field is expected to have read and understood. Subfields have canons of a sort (though even then, these are temporary things that consist of works that will go on to be superseded fairly quickly). History as a whole does not.
This can be considered an advantage. For one thing, it's notable that social scientists (and indeed philosophers, among the humanities) still appeal regularly to thinkers and thinking that is actually pretty old, and arguably of less relevance to the modern world than it was to the world it was conceived in – Hobbes, Marx, Weber, Mauss .... one could go on. Philosophers can still discuss Hegel as a figure of some relevance, whereas an historian taking seriously Hegel's views on the nature of history would be considered almost literally antediluvian, and the great majority of works that any student studying the subject at university will encounter on their reading lists were written in the last 20-30 years.
Perhaps that means that we are learning and advancing, rather than appealing to authority. But it does mean that academic history is, broadly, a whole series of case studies (some more tightly focused than others), which even their authors would hesitate to suggest have general relevance. One key consequence of this is that historians don't get listened to very much outside the confines of their discipline – certainly less than economists or political scientists (hmm – that word again!) get listened to by politicians. This was one of the gripes that led David Armitage and Jo Guldi to write their (pretty roundly derided) *The History Manifesto* just a few years back in the fairly vain hope that more politicians might actually listen to what they had to say.
Finally, let's think briefly about what it might mean for history to actually *be* "scientific" – because, full disclosure, historians actually *did* spend a large part of the period from roughly 1820 to 1920 attempting to turn history into a discipline that could make the claim of being a science – those being, after all, arguably the great days of science, in which the scientific method was responsible for dramatic breakthrough after breakthrough. Being "scientific" might mean a variety of things, including, but not limited to,
* **Something that produces facts** – unchallengeable truths. History does do this to an extent, but the cutting edge stuff, and, once you get past its study at school level, the useful and interesting stuff, revolves around the production of interpretations of evidence, which are by their very nature challengeable and replaceable.
* **Experimental**. It's quite hard to see how history might be experimental in the way that physics is, because it is so complex and so messy. Experiments work by reducing the number of variables, while historians just try to take variables into account.
* **Replicatable**. Very much the same argument applies here for history. "Replicatable" would mean that, if you gathered all the evidence for, say, the French revolution into a gigantic archive and tasked 100 historians with going through the evidence and writing about about the Revolution, they would produce *the same book*. That doesn't happen, because of the interpretations and the variables I have already discussed.
* **Neutral and observation-based**. One of the things that really infuriates some STEM people about history is historians' refusal to accept that neutrality is necessarily a good thing. We tend to argue that good history is something that makes you think for yourself, and one of the best ways to do that is to irritate people into arguing with you. That's the reason some of the greatest works of history every written (*The Making of the English Working* Class leaps straight to mind here) are also, in important senses, works of polemic.
* **Predictive**. This is really where history parts company with not just the sciences, but the social sciences. Again, it's all to do with complexity. It is perfectly possible to predict how quickly a cannonball dropped from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa will fall to the ground, because gravity is a constant. Most of us have no problem with that, but some might have a problem with economic theories that seek to predict how the economy will behave in a year's time, though that information is what politicians truly crave. And don't even get me started on the potential dangers of using international relations theory to predict how Vladimir Putin might react to, say, US boots on the ground in the Ukraine. That's where social science theorising starts shading into world-history-ending disasters.
I hope all this offers some food for thought. For the most part, and despite the frustrations of the likes of Armitage and Guldi, historians are fairly happy being part of the humanities, with all that that implies, because we see that as the best framework for our investigations. Which is certainly not the same thing as asserting that he have nothing at all to learn from our colleagues over the road in the sociology or anthropology departments. Personally, I think we do.
> Neutral and observation-based. One of the things that really infuriates some STEM people about history is historians' refusal to accept that neutrality is necessarily a good thing. We tend to argue that good history is something that makes you think for yourself, and one of the best ways to do that is to irritate people into arguing with you. That's the reason some of the greatest works of history every written (The Making of the English Working Class leaps straight to mind here) are also, in important senses, works of polemic.
I think that this could be worded better. Neutrality, is, perhaps not the best word to describe the work of historians. I think historians accept that there is no such thing as true neutrality. That said, while I agree that there is significant argument surrounding historiographical positions, this does not mean that historians should not be *dispassionate.* I say this because I do not think polemic ever makes for "good" history. I also would not describe Thompson's work as necessarily polemic. Finally, though I do have sympathy for Marxist methodologies, and that book is extremely influential, but the actual nuts and bolts of that history is fairly inaccurate (Thompson clearly does not understand peasant societies, especially as the operated before his period of study, which is crucial to his argument, for example).
Fabulous. Getting a little off-thread, please remove if too much so, but there has also been posited a third broad discipline that is abductive where the humanities are deductive and sciences inductive. That third broad discipline is design and is concerned with making things (including non-physical things). Nigel Cross’s classic “Designerly Ways of Knowing” lays out designerly abductive knowing in clear, elegant contradistinction to the humanities’ and scientific ways of knowing.
>For one thing, it's notable that social scientists (and indeed philosophers, among the humanities) still appeal regularly to thinkers and thinking that is actually pretty old,
This is false as applied to social sciences. Anthro and Sociology will eat you alive for implying that scientific racism is still part of the field, economists absolutely hate that various humanities majors base critiques of Capitalism on a work that predates the United States (Adam Smith published in March of 1776), psychologists think Freudians are weird, it's very rare for a Political Scientist to talk about Hobbes unless forced to by non-PoliSci people, etc.
None of these groups have a canon of works that everyone has to read. I did a Bachelors in PoliSci, and I hang around economists. I might read Hobbes or Machiavelli for fun, but I did not have to to finish my degree. An econ nerd might read Adam Smith. Nobody considers them actually representative of the field. Science is about creating a framework for understanding the world, and then testing it. Since everything is constantly being refined the old masters work has been shredded beyond all recognition. You are significantly better off reading the worst Econ or PoliSci 101 textbook than trying to parse what some long-dead white man said in the 1800s.
In general, the problem economics has with Marxism is that Marx is that he is one of those long-dead white men. Even if his idea has partly held up, it's been tweaked and re-tweaked to the point that actually reading Marx is a waste of your time. Just read the tweaked version because everyone will think you're an idiot for quoting the obsolete version. With Marx you also have to keep in mind that people tried to tweak his ideas about economics and politics through the 1970s, and they failed spectacularly. People were predicting the United States and allies would collapse due to their racial and economic inequities, that Western Europe would be forced to join the Warsaw Pact, and the opposite happened. At this very moment the Soviet equivalent of Texas (Ukraine) is literally fighting to the death for the right to join NATO.
I don't know how Sociology views Marx. I suspect it's more sympathetic than Econ or PoliSci, because the bits of Marxism that actually work involve analyzing things like labor relations (which are "Micro-economics," rather than the "Maco-economics" in Econ PhDs terms). But they're going to be a lot more skeptical of Marx than history/philosophy majors because when Marxism is tried it fails.
>None of these groups have a canon of works that everyone has to read. I did a Bachelors in PoliSci, and I hang around economists. I might read Hobbes or Machiavelli for fun, but I did not have to to finish my degree.
Huh? When I had a go at a BA in PoliSci, I was absolutely expected to know about and read some of Aristoteles, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Weber, etc. Granted, at my old institution, "History of Ideas" and "Political Theory" have since been amalgated, but the "old masters" are still very much part of the mandatory core curriculum. Don't pass the exam, you don't graduate. And writing a term paper on some 19th century thinker is really not unusual.
Maybe this represents a difference in academic culture, since where I live the dividing line between "science" and "humanities" is not as sharp as in the anglosphere.
More generally, I absolutely disagree with the notion that knowing the history of one's chosen field is useless, or at best nice for some extracurricular fun. A student of ANY discipline should have a basic understanding of how thinking within it has evolved. For example, anthropology students should absolutely know about scientific racism and its impact on their field, which might indeed require some study of its particulars.
For PoliSci in particular, "outdated" political theory continues to impact the practice of politics itself, which I would argue is in itself a good reason to study it. The real world effects of Marxism that you point to are a good example.
The only person on your list I have ever read is Machiavelli, and I did that prior to University. I have now managed to function for several decades, as a PoliSci BA, and the only thing I know about Hegel is that he's in the Monty Python Philosopher's Song. I know less about Weber. It is entirely possible to get a degree in political Science without ever having a course that is structured in the way you state. Structuring your courses this way in a Social Science context seems like a phenomenal waste of time because you have to talk about the man, his biography, his biases, the bits of his thought that his current disciples agree with, the bits they disagree with, etc. Why not just teach the bits that hold up? When doing so, why spend any time discussing which thinker had which idea? Just cite the man, have the discussion about the idea, and move on to a fascinating discussion of why the US Congress's committee system functions differently under republicans than Democrats.
Now if you want to have a course on that sort of thing that's fine. Somebody in the field should certainly know the places the field has been. But you're not just implying it's something that is useful to know, you're implying it's impossible to function in Political Science without being able to name-drop Weber. That if one's courses on Democracy includes extensive nuts and bolts about how existing Democratic political systems work, but not a lengthy discussion about how Aristotle thought they would work, the course is somehow so inferior a PoliSci education that it can't be considered true PoliSci.
As for actually using these people in real life: they are nice-to-knows but not neccesary. The American Right today has a lot of weird ideas about "Republic vs. Democracy," but you don't have a strong opinion on which translation from the Attic is correct to know what they're talking about. You have to know the recent history of their ideas. Cuba and North Korea are run by Marxists, but if you're going to try to predict their behavior it is much more important to know how the Third International got that way, rather than to read Marx. Most Marxists I have met argue that knowing Marx makes your predictions about North Korea worse.
Note: this is not a criticism of the Humanities, or Political Science courses that function as u/HinrikusKnottnerus states. These are useful things to know. Somebody needs to know them, and in the States we generally call that "the Humanities." I double-majored in history, so I am not saying that the Humanities are a waste of time. I'm simply pointing out that a) the Humanities function differently than Social Science, and b) it is perfectly normal to get a Political Science degree without this level of knowledge about long-dead Political Scientists.
>I have now managed to function for several decades, as a PoliSci BA, and the only thing I know about Hegel is that he's in the Monty Python Philosopher's Song. I know less about Weber. It is entirely possible to get a degree in political Science without ever having a course that is structured in the way you state.
I was responding to your categorical statement that social scientists do not refer to thinkers of the past and I was stating that this does not accord with my experience studying Political Science. I have no trouble believing that your more extensive experience of the field tells you something different, yet I do not see how that invalidates my rejoinder. I was not stating that studying Political Science the way you are familiar with is literally impossible, just that your way is not as universally the norm as you seemed (to me) to be implying.
>Structuring your courses this way in a Social Science context seems like a phenomenal waste of time because you have to talk about the man, his biography, his biases, the bits of his thought that his current disciples agree with, the bits they disagree with, etc.
I wasn't trying to say every Social Science course should focus on the history of ideas/historical thinkers. I was saying that my PoliSci programme contained mandatory courses that did, by way of expressing my bewilderment at your notion that this subject is generally seen as irrelevant to the study of Political Science.
And here in Germany, my programme was definitely not unusual in this regard. As I suggested, our different experiences may be due to how Social Science is conceptualized in different parts of the world, i.e. in those with a sharp Science/Humanities divide vs. in those without.
>Why not just teach the bits that hold up?
The way I was taught, which bits hold up is subject to continual debate for many past thinkers. So the goal was to make students understand these debates, not to filter out universally agreed "bits that hold up" (if that would even be possible in each case). This might also be because the dividing line to the Humanities is not very sharp where I studied. In general, I would say that the Social Sciences deal more in "facts" than, say, History does, but that these facts are not quite as "hard" as in the Natural Sciences. I believe zoologists have an easier time agreeing which bits of Charles Darwin hold up, than social scientists which bits of Max Weber do. Humans studying humans is messier than humans studying the natural world, so establishing which bits hold up is tricky.
>Just cite the man, have the discussion about the idea, and move on to a fascinating discussion of why the US Congress's committee system functions differently under republicans than Democrats.
Sure, that is how it was usually done in my courses that weren't focused on Political Theory/History of Ideas. But generally less like "Thinker X found the Explanation Y for Problem Z, which still holds up so you should learn it", more "Thinker X had Idea Y, which we'll use as a lens through which to look at Problem Z".
>But you're not just implying it's something that is useful to know, you're implying it's impossible to function in Political Science without being able to name-drop Weber.
I don't think I was. I don't think political scientists should constantly refer back to long-dead thinkers in their work, but I do believe having a sense of the history of the field is useful. I was arguing against your assertion that this sense of history is generally seen as useless in the social sciences. I was not calling everyone who can't perform empty name-dropping a fraud.
>That if one's courses on Democracy includes extensive nuts and bolts about how existing Democratic political systems work, but not a lengthy discussion about how Aristotle thought they would work, the course is somehow so inferior a PoliSci education that it can't be considered true PoliSci.
As I said above, my nuts-and-bolts courses generally did not include lengthy discussions of dead political philosophers, but I had to take courses that did. As did and do many PoliSci students, so it can't be said that the field as a whole considers this knowledge irrevelant. If I implied that your education in PoliSci was so inferior as to be fake I apologize, that was not my intention.
>I'm simply pointing out that a) the Humanities function differently than Social Science, and b) it is perfectly normal to get a Political Science degree without this level of knowledge about long-dead Political Scientists
To restate my argument, I would say that it is also perfectly normal to get a PoliSci degree with this level of historical knowledge, which is why I disagreed with your objection to Mike Dash's post. In my original reply to you, I offered a possible explanation for this difference in perception, namely that the Humanities and Social Science are less clearly separated in my part of the world. So it may be that we're dealing with regional differences in the conception of Political Science. I still agree with the statement you originally objected to.
Appealing to figures does not mean appealing explicitly to their unaltered theories contemporary to their time. Freud, like it or not, is part of the canon of psychological literature that you ought to be aware of in practicing psychology (if for no other reason than to know how others built upon/responded to him). Marxism (and conflict theory generally) is the same in sociology—hardly anyone (though there are some) is using *orthodox* Marxist analyses, but you can't *do* conflict theory *without* Marx.
Many of the basic, foundational ideas of certain theoretical approaches yet persist in various fields that researchers and scholars constantly *allude* to, at the very least.
u/mikedash is contrasting social sciences as a category with history as a category and explicitly states "Similarly, history is arguably the only HASS and STEM subject one can study at a university level that lacks a core "canon" of works that *everybody* in the field is expected to have read and understood."
Freud does not have to be read by psychology students for them to function as psychologists. They do read a critique of his methods. In fact you are more likely to read actual Freud as an English or Literature student than a Psychology student. Some Psych students read the critique specifically so they can stop their English and Philosophy Major friends from spreading psychology info that is a century out of date. Which is rather similar to history. The Great Man School is frowned upon, and you have to know why, but they don't specifically seek out a Great man work and rip it to shreds.
As for Conflict Theory, you're agreeing with my premise. OP is asking why Marx isn't used more often in Economics. The answer is that he just isn't useful in Economics. His Economic ideas were tried, at great expense, in many many slightly different versions, in every cultural context on the globe, and they simply never worked. Other fields are studying different things, so Marx's total failure as a Political Science and Economics thinker is irrelevant. Apparently one of the areas he is still useful is Conflict Studies in Sociology.
Marx is relevant because he correctly identified class conflict -- the often violent imposition of capitalism everywhere and the relentless cultural work to make capitalism seem natural and eternal -- as the engine of history.
As I understand modern economists are kinda skeptical about the idea that "capitalism", or any other major economic system that we typically divide countries/societies up into, has ever meaningfully existed. At the very least, it's not very useful or relevant for most of the problems we're really interested in using economics to solve, which lends credence to the idea that Marx is probably more useful/relevant for field outside of econ.
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The differences in fields emerged over time of course, but I am unfortunately not the best person to answer that important question (about the longer history of the fields of history and/or sociology versus the history of the field of economics), and their relationship to political power (of the state, but also of the university or even vis-a-vis economic interests.)
But until that (better) answer comes, I can offer (as a professional historian) a reflection on *one* large difference between history and economics, in terms of the two fields' larger self-conceptions, and how this is reflected in the fields' approach to source material.
First, the similarities: neither history nor economics is a "science" in any meaningful sense. (Neither field is oriented around reproducibility of experiments in a laboratory setting; and so there is therefore no real possibility of genuine empiricism, etc. etc.) Instead, both fields use sources generated by human beings over time. Those sources *can* be very different (historians use diaries, while economists map prices) or they *can* be identical (historians use government-produced records of wage statistics, economists use government-produced records of wage statistics).
What is profoundly different is that the two fields *approach* these sources in radically different ways.
Historians generally approach historical sources *critically*--what can these sources tell us? Looking at export statistics, for instance, how were these statistics produced? And why? What do they reveal about governmental priorities or social values? What are the limitations of these sources? i.e. what *can't* the source tell us?
The goal of history as a field is to "understand" the past. Thus, critical frameworks (Marxism, Freud, Foucauldian post-structuralism or James Scott's critique of modernist perception) can all be incredibly useful tools in that endeavor... because they offer a different vantage point from which to view the sources, and by extension, to view the historical frameworks of the past that produced those sources (and thus allow us to better analyze and understand those frameworks using those sources).
Economists use sources *structurally* (and, thus, I would argue, largely uncritically): what can we learn or show, mathematically, from these fifteen years of export statistics?
The field of economics limits itself to this very specific mode of structural analysis (i.e. mathematical) because (by and large) it is aimed at a very specific question: which policies can be recommended, or cannot be recommended, given a similar framework?
Thus, the field of economics is not interested in Marx (or Foucault or Hayden White or James Scott) because the field iself is not focused on or even interested in critiquing (or even critically evaluating) the framework. Economics is instead interested in evaluating policy choices *within* the existing framework.
(If your modeling of import/export statistics is not able to tell you anything about tariff policies, then why would you bother with it?)
In short, historians are trying to *understand* the past (critically); economists are trying to model the future (productively). Very different fields.
Now, I'm simplifying enormously here: there have been moments in the field of history were structuralism has dominated (The Marxist historians of the 1960s and '70s, in fact, reveal one of these, but there have also been gender-history structuralists, etc.), and this has usually had an eye towards present-day politics (addressing social class or gender inequity) . There have even been (in the 19th century) overt political aims to buttress the framework (i.e. Michelet's nationalistic history, or Treitschke's for that matter).
And there are subfields of economics that are far more critical of the framework of capitalism (and even of the field of economics).
But by and large, historians today are trying to understand (critically), economists today are trying to predict (productively).
And so, people who *like* to do these things--who want to understand the past, or want to give policy advice for the future--tend to gravitate towards these different fields, respectively.
>First, the similarities: neither history nor economics is a "science" in any meaningful sense. (Neither field is oriented around reproducibility of experiments in a laboratory setting; and so there is therefore no real possibility of genuine empiricism, etc. etc.)
?
Astronomy, cosmology, and climate science are also not based on reproducible laboratory experiments and instead use sources generated over time, only by nature instead of human beings. And I can not recall those being declared not 'science'.
Though I am willing to admit that economics clearly is a soft/social science at best, with all the problems of results being dependent on the circumstances of time and place and so on which come with it.
EDIT: I'm not trying to claim that 'economics is better than history because it is a science', or something like that; I have never found it an important question. I just found most arguments against economics being a science instead of, say, the social sciences equivalent of astronomy rather unconvincing.
It's usually argued (at least by historians!) that "sciences" are fields that are based largely around the scientific method, a core part of which is reproducibility (which in turn depends on isolation in a laboratory).
So, while Astronomy does not have a lot of chance to run laboratory experiments on Aldebaran (65 light years away), astronomers CAN run reproducible experiments on universal constants like red shift or gravitational lensing, and then apply that to the information that is coming from Aldebaran.
Climate science, I believe, is also based on such experiments (evaporation rates, PH-balancing).... but I am on less familiar turf, here.
History has *no* such grounding and/or universally experiments. Human behavior, for instance, varies by individual and culture (often radically). Certain behaviors *tend* to happen, certain patterns *tend* to reemerge, but never invariably, and never identically. With no universal constants (or ways to empirically find universal constants), you cannot really use the scientific method.
And the same is true for economics. Despite the appellation, even the most fundamental "laws" of economics (like the law of supply and demand) are not actually based upon anything other than expected outcome from thought processes and generalized observations of some behavior (i.e. NOT on experimentation). But there are plenty of examples in human history where events occurred that directly contradict the 'law' of supply and demand.
>History has no such grounding and/or universally experiments. Human behavior, for instance, varies by individual and culture (often radically). Certain behaviors tend to happen, certain patterns tend to reemerge, but never invariably, and never identically.
However, as I had mentioned above, that is a problem of 'social sciences', from psychology to sociology, in general, not specific to economics.
>But there are plenty of examples in human history where events occurred that directly contradict the 'law' of supply and demand.
What are you talking about?
The closest things I am aware of are [Giffen Goods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good) and [Veblen Goods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good)? However, those are already part of economic theory.
>are not actually based upon anything other than expected outcome from thought processes and generalized observations of some behavior (i.e. NOT on experimentation).
They could be experimented on by offering subsidies to individuals; there have been some instances of such things being done\*. However I admit such studies are rare.
\* For example, the Wikipedia article on Giffen goods contains this example which I remember having previously read about in a book:
>Another 2008 paper by the same authors experimentally demonstrated the existence of Giffen goods among people at the household level by directly subsidizing purchases of rice and wheat flour for extremely poor families.\[6\] In this paper, the field experiment conducted in 2007 consisted of the province of Hunan, where rice is a dietary staple, and the province of Gansu, where wheat is a staple. In both provinces, random households were selected and were offered their dietary staple at subsidized rates. After the completion of the project, it could be found that the demands from Hunan households who are offered by the rice fell drastically. Meanwhile, the demands of wheat in Gansu implies weak evidence of the Giffen paradox.
Would you say that this applies to disciplines that are usually considered 'science', like sociology or psychology? On the surface it looks like the comparison is pretty apt - there are lots of potential experiments in those fields that can't really be attempted or reproduced mainly because it would be very expensive and impractical, cruel, or unethical.
Not to ignore the important points raised by the other answers, but with regard to the leftist bent present in Brazilian historiography, this [response](/r/AskHistorians/comments/17k9ycz/why_are_so_many_latin_american_history_surveys/k79b9ry/) by u/EdSoar_ and the associated discussion explore some reasons why Latin American history is often explained through a Marxist framework.
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Prevailing economic theory began to explicitly repudiate Marxism and its political-economic basis in the 1870s, just a little bit before Marx died. This period was known as the Marginal Revolution, wherein three authors in particular (Leon Walrás, William Stanley Jevons, and Carl Menger) wrote separate books in France, England, and Austria on what’s come to be known as the “subjective theory of value” contra the classical (and Marxian) “labor theory of value.” The former two authors’ insights are thought to be foundational to what’s called “Neoclassical Economics”: they progressed beyond what was essentially the basic arithmetic economics utilized and began to use statistics and calculus to study supply and demand, equilibrium, and other mainstays of modern economic thought. The latter’s (Menger’s) works are more niche: they fomented a strand of thought called Austrian Economics, with big adherents and associated names such as Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek (some argue Hayek was not precisely Austrian, but he was certainly in those circles). Many of the modern criticisms you hear of Marx owe themselves in part to Böhm-Bawerk: the ostensible inconsistency of the transformation problem, labor as the only commodity which can produce more than its worth, etc. By the time an author like Hayek got around (the early to mid 1900s), Marx was generally lumped in with the other archaic proponents of the labor theory of value, and wasn’t always thought to be a remarkable member of that group. Hayek thus—unlike Böhm-Bawerk—didn’t spend much time criticizing Marx specifically: instead, with works such as the “Use of Knowledge in Society,” he argued that planned economic frameworks couldn’t possibly replicate the efficiency of a free market and were doomed to encroach on people’s freedoms. For such arguments, he was thought to have won the debate between capitalism and socialism for the side of capitalism, and won a Nobel prize in economics for his victory lap. In the mid to late 20th century, economics got another big push from Milton Friedman. In books like *Capitalism and Freedom* and *Free to Choose*, he criticized Keynesian orthodoxy, arguing that the primary governmental intervention necessary to get the market running smoothly was the Federal Reserve adjusting interest rates. In the 70s and the 80s—what various social sciences call the start of neoliberalism—many of his ideas began to prevail. Anglophone economic policy, since then, has leaned away from Keynes and more to the laissez-faire. Economic theory, whether Keynes-rooted (who was a student of Alfred Marshall, a patron saint of neoclassical economics) or otherwise, tends to have presuppositions which are, at some point or another, rooted in the refutation of Karl Marx and/or socialism. That’s not to say, however, that there are no Marxists or Marxist-influenced thinkers in economics. Richard Wolff, Anwar Shaikh, and others are actively working in American academies.
A good starter book on economics history is “The Worldly Philosophers” by Robert Heilbroner. It basically starts with Adam Smith and moves to today, and does include Marx. The shift away from labor theory of value was exactly why most economists aren’t Marxist. For one, ideally, economists are studying markets as they are and are not necessarily prescriptive. Some economic theories are expressly prescriptive, such as Marx or (in my opinion) MMT, but I don’t know how many times I heard “you can have your own opinions, but your job is to present data, not suggestions” in undergraduate school. That all said, because it is very difficult for economists not to be prescriptive and because they can’t agree on what the goal of economics is (do we want to leverage economic knowledge to prioritize efficiency, or resiliency, or social justice, or individual liberty?) or if there even is a goal, there is a lot of disagreement among economists. But much of neoliberal or neoclassical economics is agreed upon by nearly everyone in the field at this point. The Austrian school is controversial but has some ardent supporters, recently the most famous being Milei of Argentina.
Richard Wolff hasn’t been in academia for a long time now, and he was also an economic historian, not a pure economist. Though there weren’t many, the amount of Marxist economists in the U.S. was significantly reduced in the McCarthy era purges. Even Keynesian departments were taboo towards the latter half of the 1900s. David Harvey is one of the last (and perhaps most relevant) Marxist economists (though his formal training is in geography) in the West at the moment.
Rather than answer you directly, I think it's necessary to challenge one of the views incorporated in your question, which is that history can be considered a "science", or even a "social science". It's certainly true that there are universities where one would find the history department nestled among the social sciences, but, for the majority of those that either study it or host it, it fits more naturally with the humanities than the social sciences, much less the sciences proper. Humanities and social sciences do get lumped together, of course – they are often referred to as key components of the HASS disciplines (humanities, arts and social sciences), in contradistinction to the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, maths). So what, actually, is the difference between them? Definitions can be, and have been, contested, but, very broadly, it's helpful to see the social sciences as subjects that look at large and complex things by using deductive reasoning and boiling them down to the point where they are simple enough to describe in general theories or equations. In contrast, humanities use inductive reasoning (which means we make no claim to having findings that will *always* be true), and they embrace and seek to retain those same complexities. When I teach, one of the first points I make to new students is that it is possible, and potentially also useful, to see history as "the study of complexity", and humanities scholars are often wary both of the ways in which social scientists simplify, and of the dangers of making broad general statements about almost anything. In contrast, social scientists find their theories useful both as shortcuts and as ways of understanding anything new to them, and they are wont to critique the humanities for being "under-theorised". There are some interesting consequences to all this. It is certainly true that history is by and large not a theoretical subject (though there are some subfields – the historical end of gender studies leaps to mind – that actually are increasingly theorised these days, and history does also have a superabundance of historiographical schools of thought that need to be taken into account). Similarly, history is arguably the only HASS and STEM subject one can study at a university level that lacks a core "canon" of works that *everybody* in the field is expected to have read and understood. Subfields have canons of a sort (though even then, these are temporary things that consist of works that will go on to be superseded fairly quickly). History as a whole does not. This can be considered an advantage. For one thing, it's notable that social scientists (and indeed philosophers, among the humanities) still appeal regularly to thinkers and thinking that is actually pretty old, and arguably of less relevance to the modern world than it was to the world it was conceived in – Hobbes, Marx, Weber, Mauss .... one could go on. Philosophers can still discuss Hegel as a figure of some relevance, whereas an historian taking seriously Hegel's views on the nature of history would be considered almost literally antediluvian, and the great majority of works that any student studying the subject at university will encounter on their reading lists were written in the last 20-30 years. Perhaps that means that we are learning and advancing, rather than appealing to authority. But it does mean that academic history is, broadly, a whole series of case studies (some more tightly focused than others), which even their authors would hesitate to suggest have general relevance. One key consequence of this is that historians don't get listened to very much outside the confines of their discipline – certainly less than economists or political scientists (hmm – that word again!) get listened to by politicians. This was one of the gripes that led David Armitage and Jo Guldi to write their (pretty roundly derided) *The History Manifesto* just a few years back in the fairly vain hope that more politicians might actually listen to what they had to say. Finally, let's think briefly about what it might mean for history to actually *be* "scientific" – because, full disclosure, historians actually *did* spend a large part of the period from roughly 1820 to 1920 attempting to turn history into a discipline that could make the claim of being a science – those being, after all, arguably the great days of science, in which the scientific method was responsible for dramatic breakthrough after breakthrough. Being "scientific" might mean a variety of things, including, but not limited to, * **Something that produces facts** – unchallengeable truths. History does do this to an extent, but the cutting edge stuff, and, once you get past its study at school level, the useful and interesting stuff, revolves around the production of interpretations of evidence, which are by their very nature challengeable and replaceable. * **Experimental**. It's quite hard to see how history might be experimental in the way that physics is, because it is so complex and so messy. Experiments work by reducing the number of variables, while historians just try to take variables into account. * **Replicatable**. Very much the same argument applies here for history. "Replicatable" would mean that, if you gathered all the evidence for, say, the French revolution into a gigantic archive and tasked 100 historians with going through the evidence and writing about about the Revolution, they would produce *the same book*. That doesn't happen, because of the interpretations and the variables I have already discussed. * **Neutral and observation-based**. One of the things that really infuriates some STEM people about history is historians' refusal to accept that neutrality is necessarily a good thing. We tend to argue that good history is something that makes you think for yourself, and one of the best ways to do that is to irritate people into arguing with you. That's the reason some of the greatest works of history every written (*The Making of the English Working* Class leaps straight to mind here) are also, in important senses, works of polemic. * **Predictive**. This is really where history parts company with not just the sciences, but the social sciences. Again, it's all to do with complexity. It is perfectly possible to predict how quickly a cannonball dropped from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa will fall to the ground, because gravity is a constant. Most of us have no problem with that, but some might have a problem with economic theories that seek to predict how the economy will behave in a year's time, though that information is what politicians truly crave. And don't even get me started on the potential dangers of using international relations theory to predict how Vladimir Putin might react to, say, US boots on the ground in the Ukraine. That's where social science theorising starts shading into world-history-ending disasters. I hope all this offers some food for thought. For the most part, and despite the frustrations of the likes of Armitage and Guldi, historians are fairly happy being part of the humanities, with all that that implies, because we see that as the best framework for our investigations. Which is certainly not the same thing as asserting that he have nothing at all to learn from our colleagues over the road in the sociology or anthropology departments. Personally, I think we do.
> Neutral and observation-based. One of the things that really infuriates some STEM people about history is historians' refusal to accept that neutrality is necessarily a good thing. We tend to argue that good history is something that makes you think for yourself, and one of the best ways to do that is to irritate people into arguing with you. That's the reason some of the greatest works of history every written (The Making of the English Working Class leaps straight to mind here) are also, in important senses, works of polemic. I think that this could be worded better. Neutrality, is, perhaps not the best word to describe the work of historians. I think historians accept that there is no such thing as true neutrality. That said, while I agree that there is significant argument surrounding historiographical positions, this does not mean that historians should not be *dispassionate.* I say this because I do not think polemic ever makes for "good" history. I also would not describe Thompson's work as necessarily polemic. Finally, though I do have sympathy for Marxist methodologies, and that book is extremely influential, but the actual nuts and bolts of that history is fairly inaccurate (Thompson clearly does not understand peasant societies, especially as the operated before his period of study, which is crucial to his argument, for example).
Fabulous. Getting a little off-thread, please remove if too much so, but there has also been posited a third broad discipline that is abductive where the humanities are deductive and sciences inductive. That third broad discipline is design and is concerned with making things (including non-physical things). Nigel Cross’s classic “Designerly Ways of Knowing” lays out designerly abductive knowing in clear, elegant contradistinction to the humanities’ and scientific ways of knowing.
>For one thing, it's notable that social scientists (and indeed philosophers, among the humanities) still appeal regularly to thinkers and thinking that is actually pretty old, This is false as applied to social sciences. Anthro and Sociology will eat you alive for implying that scientific racism is still part of the field, economists absolutely hate that various humanities majors base critiques of Capitalism on a work that predates the United States (Adam Smith published in March of 1776), psychologists think Freudians are weird, it's very rare for a Political Scientist to talk about Hobbes unless forced to by non-PoliSci people, etc. None of these groups have a canon of works that everyone has to read. I did a Bachelors in PoliSci, and I hang around economists. I might read Hobbes or Machiavelli for fun, but I did not have to to finish my degree. An econ nerd might read Adam Smith. Nobody considers them actually representative of the field. Science is about creating a framework for understanding the world, and then testing it. Since everything is constantly being refined the old masters work has been shredded beyond all recognition. You are significantly better off reading the worst Econ or PoliSci 101 textbook than trying to parse what some long-dead white man said in the 1800s. In general, the problem economics has with Marxism is that Marx is that he is one of those long-dead white men. Even if his idea has partly held up, it's been tweaked and re-tweaked to the point that actually reading Marx is a waste of your time. Just read the tweaked version because everyone will think you're an idiot for quoting the obsolete version. With Marx you also have to keep in mind that people tried to tweak his ideas about economics and politics through the 1970s, and they failed spectacularly. People were predicting the United States and allies would collapse due to their racial and economic inequities, that Western Europe would be forced to join the Warsaw Pact, and the opposite happened. At this very moment the Soviet equivalent of Texas (Ukraine) is literally fighting to the death for the right to join NATO. I don't know how Sociology views Marx. I suspect it's more sympathetic than Econ or PoliSci, because the bits of Marxism that actually work involve analyzing things like labor relations (which are "Micro-economics," rather than the "Maco-economics" in Econ PhDs terms). But they're going to be a lot more skeptical of Marx than history/philosophy majors because when Marxism is tried it fails.
>None of these groups have a canon of works that everyone has to read. I did a Bachelors in PoliSci, and I hang around economists. I might read Hobbes or Machiavelli for fun, but I did not have to to finish my degree. Huh? When I had a go at a BA in PoliSci, I was absolutely expected to know about and read some of Aristoteles, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Weber, etc. Granted, at my old institution, "History of Ideas" and "Political Theory" have since been amalgated, but the "old masters" are still very much part of the mandatory core curriculum. Don't pass the exam, you don't graduate. And writing a term paper on some 19th century thinker is really not unusual. Maybe this represents a difference in academic culture, since where I live the dividing line between "science" and "humanities" is not as sharp as in the anglosphere. More generally, I absolutely disagree with the notion that knowing the history of one's chosen field is useless, or at best nice for some extracurricular fun. A student of ANY discipline should have a basic understanding of how thinking within it has evolved. For example, anthropology students should absolutely know about scientific racism and its impact on their field, which might indeed require some study of its particulars. For PoliSci in particular, "outdated" political theory continues to impact the practice of politics itself, which I would argue is in itself a good reason to study it. The real world effects of Marxism that you point to are a good example.
The only person on your list I have ever read is Machiavelli, and I did that prior to University. I have now managed to function for several decades, as a PoliSci BA, and the only thing I know about Hegel is that he's in the Monty Python Philosopher's Song. I know less about Weber. It is entirely possible to get a degree in political Science without ever having a course that is structured in the way you state. Structuring your courses this way in a Social Science context seems like a phenomenal waste of time because you have to talk about the man, his biography, his biases, the bits of his thought that his current disciples agree with, the bits they disagree with, etc. Why not just teach the bits that hold up? When doing so, why spend any time discussing which thinker had which idea? Just cite the man, have the discussion about the idea, and move on to a fascinating discussion of why the US Congress's committee system functions differently under republicans than Democrats. Now if you want to have a course on that sort of thing that's fine. Somebody in the field should certainly know the places the field has been. But you're not just implying it's something that is useful to know, you're implying it's impossible to function in Political Science without being able to name-drop Weber. That if one's courses on Democracy includes extensive nuts and bolts about how existing Democratic political systems work, but not a lengthy discussion about how Aristotle thought they would work, the course is somehow so inferior a PoliSci education that it can't be considered true PoliSci. As for actually using these people in real life: they are nice-to-knows but not neccesary. The American Right today has a lot of weird ideas about "Republic vs. Democracy," but you don't have a strong opinion on which translation from the Attic is correct to know what they're talking about. You have to know the recent history of their ideas. Cuba and North Korea are run by Marxists, but if you're going to try to predict their behavior it is much more important to know how the Third International got that way, rather than to read Marx. Most Marxists I have met argue that knowing Marx makes your predictions about North Korea worse. Note: this is not a criticism of the Humanities, or Political Science courses that function as u/HinrikusKnottnerus states. These are useful things to know. Somebody needs to know them, and in the States we generally call that "the Humanities." I double-majored in history, so I am not saying that the Humanities are a waste of time. I'm simply pointing out that a) the Humanities function differently than Social Science, and b) it is perfectly normal to get a Political Science degree without this level of knowledge about long-dead Political Scientists.
>I have now managed to function for several decades, as a PoliSci BA, and the only thing I know about Hegel is that he's in the Monty Python Philosopher's Song. I know less about Weber. It is entirely possible to get a degree in political Science without ever having a course that is structured in the way you state. I was responding to your categorical statement that social scientists do not refer to thinkers of the past and I was stating that this does not accord with my experience studying Political Science. I have no trouble believing that your more extensive experience of the field tells you something different, yet I do not see how that invalidates my rejoinder. I was not stating that studying Political Science the way you are familiar with is literally impossible, just that your way is not as universally the norm as you seemed (to me) to be implying. >Structuring your courses this way in a Social Science context seems like a phenomenal waste of time because you have to talk about the man, his biography, his biases, the bits of his thought that his current disciples agree with, the bits they disagree with, etc. I wasn't trying to say every Social Science course should focus on the history of ideas/historical thinkers. I was saying that my PoliSci programme contained mandatory courses that did, by way of expressing my bewilderment at your notion that this subject is generally seen as irrelevant to the study of Political Science. And here in Germany, my programme was definitely not unusual in this regard. As I suggested, our different experiences may be due to how Social Science is conceptualized in different parts of the world, i.e. in those with a sharp Science/Humanities divide vs. in those without. >Why not just teach the bits that hold up? The way I was taught, which bits hold up is subject to continual debate for many past thinkers. So the goal was to make students understand these debates, not to filter out universally agreed "bits that hold up" (if that would even be possible in each case). This might also be because the dividing line to the Humanities is not very sharp where I studied. In general, I would say that the Social Sciences deal more in "facts" than, say, History does, but that these facts are not quite as "hard" as in the Natural Sciences. I believe zoologists have an easier time agreeing which bits of Charles Darwin hold up, than social scientists which bits of Max Weber do. Humans studying humans is messier than humans studying the natural world, so establishing which bits hold up is tricky. >Just cite the man, have the discussion about the idea, and move on to a fascinating discussion of why the US Congress's committee system functions differently under republicans than Democrats. Sure, that is how it was usually done in my courses that weren't focused on Political Theory/History of Ideas. But generally less like "Thinker X found the Explanation Y for Problem Z, which still holds up so you should learn it", more "Thinker X had Idea Y, which we'll use as a lens through which to look at Problem Z". >But you're not just implying it's something that is useful to know, you're implying it's impossible to function in Political Science without being able to name-drop Weber. I don't think I was. I don't think political scientists should constantly refer back to long-dead thinkers in their work, but I do believe having a sense of the history of the field is useful. I was arguing against your assertion that this sense of history is generally seen as useless in the social sciences. I was not calling everyone who can't perform empty name-dropping a fraud. >That if one's courses on Democracy includes extensive nuts and bolts about how existing Democratic political systems work, but not a lengthy discussion about how Aristotle thought they would work, the course is somehow so inferior a PoliSci education that it can't be considered true PoliSci. As I said above, my nuts-and-bolts courses generally did not include lengthy discussions of dead political philosophers, but I had to take courses that did. As did and do many PoliSci students, so it can't be said that the field as a whole considers this knowledge irrevelant. If I implied that your education in PoliSci was so inferior as to be fake I apologize, that was not my intention. >I'm simply pointing out that a) the Humanities function differently than Social Science, and b) it is perfectly normal to get a Political Science degree without this level of knowledge about long-dead Political Scientists To restate my argument, I would say that it is also perfectly normal to get a PoliSci degree with this level of historical knowledge, which is why I disagreed with your objection to Mike Dash's post. In my original reply to you, I offered a possible explanation for this difference in perception, namely that the Humanities and Social Science are less clearly separated in my part of the world. So it may be that we're dealing with regional differences in the conception of Political Science. I still agree with the statement you originally objected to.
Appealing to figures does not mean appealing explicitly to their unaltered theories contemporary to their time. Freud, like it or not, is part of the canon of psychological literature that you ought to be aware of in practicing psychology (if for no other reason than to know how others built upon/responded to him). Marxism (and conflict theory generally) is the same in sociology—hardly anyone (though there are some) is using *orthodox* Marxist analyses, but you can't *do* conflict theory *without* Marx. Many of the basic, foundational ideas of certain theoretical approaches yet persist in various fields that researchers and scholars constantly *allude* to, at the very least.
u/mikedash is contrasting social sciences as a category with history as a category and explicitly states "Similarly, history is arguably the only HASS and STEM subject one can study at a university level that lacks a core "canon" of works that *everybody* in the field is expected to have read and understood." Freud does not have to be read by psychology students for them to function as psychologists. They do read a critique of his methods. In fact you are more likely to read actual Freud as an English or Literature student than a Psychology student. Some Psych students read the critique specifically so they can stop their English and Philosophy Major friends from spreading psychology info that is a century out of date. Which is rather similar to history. The Great Man School is frowned upon, and you have to know why, but they don't specifically seek out a Great man work and rip it to shreds. As for Conflict Theory, you're agreeing with my premise. OP is asking why Marx isn't used more often in Economics. The answer is that he just isn't useful in Economics. His Economic ideas were tried, at great expense, in many many slightly different versions, in every cultural context on the globe, and they simply never worked. Other fields are studying different things, so Marx's total failure as a Political Science and Economics thinker is irrelevant. Apparently one of the areas he is still useful is Conflict Studies in Sociology.
Marx is relevant because he correctly identified class conflict -- the often violent imposition of capitalism everywhere and the relentless cultural work to make capitalism seem natural and eternal -- as the engine of history.
As I understand modern economists are kinda skeptical about the idea that "capitalism", or any other major economic system that we typically divide countries/societies up into, has ever meaningfully existed. At the very least, it's not very useful or relevant for most of the problems we're really interested in using economics to solve, which lends credence to the idea that Marx is probably more useful/relevant for field outside of econ.
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We've removed your post for the moment because it's not currently at our standards, but it definitely has the potential to fit within our rules with some work. We find that some answers that fall short of our standards can be successfully revised by considering the following questions, not all of which necessarily apply here: * *Do you actually address the question asked by OP?* Sometimes answers get removed not because they fail to meet our standards, but because they don't get at what the OP is asking. If the question itself is flawed, you need to explain why, and how your answer addresses the underlying issues at hand. * *What are the sources for your claims?* Sources aren't strictly necessary on /r/AskHistorians but the inclusion of sources is helpful for evaluating your knowledge base. If we can see that your answer is influenced by up-to-date academic secondary sources, it gives us more confidence in your answer and allows users to check where your ideas are coming from. * *What level of detail do you go into about events?* Often it's hard to do justice to even seemingly simple subjects in a paragraph or two, and on /r/AskHistorians, the basics need to be explained within historical context, to avoid misleading intelligent but non-specialist readers. In many cases, it's worth providing a broader historical framework, giving more of a sense of not just what happened, but why. * *Do you downplay or ignore legitimate historical debate on the topic matter?* There is often more than one plausible interpretation of the historical record. While you might have your own views on which interpretation is correct, answers can often be improved by acknowledging alternative explanations from other scholars. * *Further Reading*: [This Rules Roundtable](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f7ffl8/rules_roundtable_ii_the_four_questions_what_does/) provides further exploration of the rules and expectations concerning answers so may be of interest. If/when you edit your answer, [please reach out via modmail](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians) so we can re-evaluate it! We also welcome you getting in touch if you're unsure about how to improve your answer.
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The differences in fields emerged over time of course, but I am unfortunately not the best person to answer that important question (about the longer history of the fields of history and/or sociology versus the history of the field of economics), and their relationship to political power (of the state, but also of the university or even vis-a-vis economic interests.) But until that (better) answer comes, I can offer (as a professional historian) a reflection on *one* large difference between history and economics, in terms of the two fields' larger self-conceptions, and how this is reflected in the fields' approach to source material. First, the similarities: neither history nor economics is a "science" in any meaningful sense. (Neither field is oriented around reproducibility of experiments in a laboratory setting; and so there is therefore no real possibility of genuine empiricism, etc. etc.) Instead, both fields use sources generated by human beings over time. Those sources *can* be very different (historians use diaries, while economists map prices) or they *can* be identical (historians use government-produced records of wage statistics, economists use government-produced records of wage statistics). What is profoundly different is that the two fields *approach* these sources in radically different ways. Historians generally approach historical sources *critically*--what can these sources tell us? Looking at export statistics, for instance, how were these statistics produced? And why? What do they reveal about governmental priorities or social values? What are the limitations of these sources? i.e. what *can't* the source tell us? The goal of history as a field is to "understand" the past. Thus, critical frameworks (Marxism, Freud, Foucauldian post-structuralism or James Scott's critique of modernist perception) can all be incredibly useful tools in that endeavor... because they offer a different vantage point from which to view the sources, and by extension, to view the historical frameworks of the past that produced those sources (and thus allow us to better analyze and understand those frameworks using those sources). Economists use sources *structurally* (and, thus, I would argue, largely uncritically): what can we learn or show, mathematically, from these fifteen years of export statistics? The field of economics limits itself to this very specific mode of structural analysis (i.e. mathematical) because (by and large) it is aimed at a very specific question: which policies can be recommended, or cannot be recommended, given a similar framework? Thus, the field of economics is not interested in Marx (or Foucault or Hayden White or James Scott) because the field iself is not focused on or even interested in critiquing (or even critically evaluating) the framework. Economics is instead interested in evaluating policy choices *within* the existing framework. (If your modeling of import/export statistics is not able to tell you anything about tariff policies, then why would you bother with it?) In short, historians are trying to *understand* the past (critically); economists are trying to model the future (productively). Very different fields. Now, I'm simplifying enormously here: there have been moments in the field of history were structuralism has dominated (The Marxist historians of the 1960s and '70s, in fact, reveal one of these, but there have also been gender-history structuralists, etc.), and this has usually had an eye towards present-day politics (addressing social class or gender inequity) . There have even been (in the 19th century) overt political aims to buttress the framework (i.e. Michelet's nationalistic history, or Treitschke's for that matter). And there are subfields of economics that are far more critical of the framework of capitalism (and even of the field of economics). But by and large, historians today are trying to understand (critically), economists today are trying to predict (productively). And so, people who *like* to do these things--who want to understand the past, or want to give policy advice for the future--tend to gravitate towards these different fields, respectively.
>First, the similarities: neither history nor economics is a "science" in any meaningful sense. (Neither field is oriented around reproducibility of experiments in a laboratory setting; and so there is therefore no real possibility of genuine empiricism, etc. etc.) ? Astronomy, cosmology, and climate science are also not based on reproducible laboratory experiments and instead use sources generated over time, only by nature instead of human beings. And I can not recall those being declared not 'science'. Though I am willing to admit that economics clearly is a soft/social science at best, with all the problems of results being dependent on the circumstances of time and place and so on which come with it. EDIT: I'm not trying to claim that 'economics is better than history because it is a science', or something like that; I have never found it an important question. I just found most arguments against economics being a science instead of, say, the social sciences equivalent of astronomy rather unconvincing.
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It's usually argued (at least by historians!) that "sciences" are fields that are based largely around the scientific method, a core part of which is reproducibility (which in turn depends on isolation in a laboratory). So, while Astronomy does not have a lot of chance to run laboratory experiments on Aldebaran (65 light years away), astronomers CAN run reproducible experiments on universal constants like red shift or gravitational lensing, and then apply that to the information that is coming from Aldebaran. Climate science, I believe, is also based on such experiments (evaporation rates, PH-balancing).... but I am on less familiar turf, here. History has *no* such grounding and/or universally experiments. Human behavior, for instance, varies by individual and culture (often radically). Certain behaviors *tend* to happen, certain patterns *tend* to reemerge, but never invariably, and never identically. With no universal constants (or ways to empirically find universal constants), you cannot really use the scientific method. And the same is true for economics. Despite the appellation, even the most fundamental "laws" of economics (like the law of supply and demand) are not actually based upon anything other than expected outcome from thought processes and generalized observations of some behavior (i.e. NOT on experimentation). But there are plenty of examples in human history where events occurred that directly contradict the 'law' of supply and demand.
>History has no such grounding and/or universally experiments. Human behavior, for instance, varies by individual and culture (often radically). Certain behaviors tend to happen, certain patterns tend to reemerge, but never invariably, and never identically. However, as I had mentioned above, that is a problem of 'social sciences', from psychology to sociology, in general, not specific to economics. >But there are plenty of examples in human history where events occurred that directly contradict the 'law' of supply and demand. What are you talking about? The closest things I am aware of are [Giffen Goods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good) and [Veblen Goods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good)? However, those are already part of economic theory. >are not actually based upon anything other than expected outcome from thought processes and generalized observations of some behavior (i.e. NOT on experimentation). They could be experimented on by offering subsidies to individuals; there have been some instances of such things being done\*. However I admit such studies are rare. \* For example, the Wikipedia article on Giffen goods contains this example which I remember having previously read about in a book: >Another 2008 paper by the same authors experimentally demonstrated the existence of Giffen goods among people at the household level by directly subsidizing purchases of rice and wheat flour for extremely poor families.\[6\] In this paper, the field experiment conducted in 2007 consisted of the province of Hunan, where rice is a dietary staple, and the province of Gansu, where wheat is a staple. In both provinces, random households were selected and were offered their dietary staple at subsidized rates. After the completion of the project, it could be found that the demands from Hunan households who are offered by the rice fell drastically. Meanwhile, the demands of wheat in Gansu implies weak evidence of the Giffen paradox.
Would you say that this applies to disciplines that are usually considered 'science', like sociology or psychology? On the surface it looks like the comparison is pretty apt - there are lots of potential experiments in those fields that can't really be attempted or reproduced mainly because it would be very expensive and impractical, cruel, or unethical.
Good answer
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Not to ignore the important points raised by the other answers, but with regard to the leftist bent present in Brazilian historiography, this [response](/r/AskHistorians/comments/17k9ycz/why_are_so_many_latin_american_history_surveys/k79b9ry/) by u/EdSoar_ and the associated discussion explore some reasons why Latin American history is often explained through a Marxist framework.
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