On Pasinetti’s “Separation Teoremâ€

All along his intellectual life, Luigi Pasinetti promoted a style of economic theorizing free of institutional content, at least at the stage of the “pure†theory, possibly incorporating some institutional content at a second stage of the analysis. In 2007 this conviction took the definitive form of a “separation theorem†(about the necessity of keeping rigorously separated the two steps of economic analysis) which raised a number of criticisms. In this short note I argue that this separation encounters some difficulties due to the nature of economic models, consisting of a pure mathematical structure accompanied by a set of interpretative assumptions through which some institutional content an creep into, implicitly and sometimes even inadvertently, more often than not. However, these difficulties notwithstanding, Pasinetti firmly maintained his position because he regarded the role of economic theory as that of discovering fundamental relations produced by immutable forces which human beings cannot escape.