economics + sociology = love?
If you look at the list of department chairs here at Indiana, you’ll notice that the first few were chairs of “economics and sociology.” I thought the old combined economics and sociology department at Indiana was some historical accident. That is, until I read The Emergence of Sociology from Political Economy in the United States: 1890 to 1940 by Cristobal Young. The article, published in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, makes a few simple points:
- Economics came first and sociology was added to existing programs. Solo sociology programs, like Chicago, were in the distinct minority.
- Most sociology programs were part of economics programs until the 1920s.
- There was still much collaboration between sociology and economics until the 1940s.
- Once economic institutionalism finally faded, ties between disciplines faded.
- The separation really started when sociologists started their separate meetings.
What to make of this history? A few thoughts: 1. Heterodox economists should just give up on mainstream economists and hang out with sociologists. 2. There was some sort of hybrid disciplinary action going on that got truncated in the 1940s. It probably happened on both sides. Mathematical formalism made strides in economics, while structuralism appeared in sociology at the same time. These formalizations probably created needless rifts between disciplines. It might be worth seeing if that multi-disciplinary history can be reconstructed.
Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz
I think a lot of that history has to be seen in light of the emergence of land grant institutions and the importance of agricultural economics and rural sociology to the programs that developed in the first wave of multiversities which formed when the United States decided it was serious about education (something it abandoned in 1980….). So, sociology didn’t really emerge from what we today think of as academic economics, but from something far more like ag. ec. as it exists in its most primitive forms in vestigial departments (often housed in Ag schools).
sherkat
October 16, 2012 at 12:08 am
Darren, thanks for the comment. And I do hope that at you house, economics + sociology truly is love.
fabiorojas
October 16, 2012 at 2:43 am
I enter this particular arena gingerly, as I’m neither an academic nor an American.So I may not be able to contribute thatmuch to the discussion.
But 35 years ago, at a fairly decent British university, I started an undergraduate degree in Sociology and was inducted into what was then considered the industry standard cliché for the subject, to wit:
“Sociology is nothing but a 100 year conversation with the ghost of Marx”.
if one pushed one’s tutor on this point – what about Weber? what about Durkheim? – they tended to elaborate an answer along the following lines (I paraphrase for would be comic effect):
“Adam Smith invented the discipline of political economy, and when what we now call the economics profession abandoned it in favour of concentrating on the inheritance of ‘The Wealth of Nations’ alone and lots of marginal utility related sums, the people we now call sociologists carried on analysing political economy – which is what Marx so famously critiqued in Capital, hence the 100 year conversation. Anyway, go read ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ and then come back next week with your paper on it”.
Or perhaps this was just an oddity of a mid-1970s British sociological degree education, who knows?
CharlieMcMenamim
October 16, 2012 at 1:34 pm
Definitely an oddity of the UK. There’s a lot of variance when it comes to intro sociology. Some teach it as you describe. Others teach intro soc as a survey of social problems (e.g., inequality, race, poverty, etc). I teach it as social science 101 (e.g., hypotheses, a survey of core soc areas).
fabiorojas
October 16, 2012 at 5:58 pm
Yes, that’s certainly what I thought your post was going to be about….
sherkat
October 16, 2012 at 11:49 pm