IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tua/journl/v1y2010i1p49-77.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Political Economy and Economic Science: The Work of Phyllis Deane

Author

Listed:
  • Heinrich Bortis

    (Universite de Fribourg)

Abstract

Some time ago, Phyllis Deane pointed to “an inescapable tension between political economy and economic science”. Yet, the separation of positive economics (pure and empirical) on the one hand and normative economics (pure and applied) on the other is still common among neoclassical economists and has a long tradition. Moreover, Keynes "[wanted] to emphasize strongly the point about economics being a moral science", which implies that, in his view, the separation between science and ethics cannot be maintained either. In this paper we argue that an entirely different vision of society and of man is implied in the neoclassical approach and in the classical-Keynesian approach, which is associated with widely differing views on the great problems of economic theory: value, distribution, employment and money. The method employed in both approaches is also fundamentally different; this shows up in a differing relationship between theory and historical reality. Finally, the relationship between economics on the one hand and ethics and politics on the other is sharply opposed to the liberal and to the middle-way classical-Keynesian view. It is argued that in neoclassical economics a tension exists between economic science and political economy, between theory and history and between economics on the one hand and ethics and politics, and that such a tension does not exist in classical- Keynesian political economy. The clue to this state of affairs is provided by the differing visions of society and of man associated with both approaches and the implications of these visions.

Suggested Citation

  • Heinrich Bortis, 2010. "Political Economy and Economic Science: The Work of Phyllis Deane," Journal of Economic Analysis, National Technical University of Athens, vol. 1(1), pages 49-77.
  • Handle: RePEc:tua:journl:v:1:y:2010:i:1:p:49-77
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://users.ntua.gr/jea/tua/journl/jea_volume1_issue1_pp49_77.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pesenti, Amos, 2015. "The origin of inflation in a domestic bank-based payment system," FSES Working Papers 457, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Freiburg/Fribourg Switzerland.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tua:journl:v:1:y:2010:i:1:p:49-77. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Angelos T. Vouldis (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ltntugr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.