ABSTRACT

In the interwar period, while home economists were conducting economic analysis within a program of their own, a multiplicity of competing conceptualizations of consumer theory were on offer within economics departments – often within the same department – throughout the country. There was no clear demarcation between identifiable neoclassical economists and their rivals from the institutional school (Morgan and Rutherford 1998; Yonay 1998; Samuels 2000). However, in the decades following the Second World Ward, neoclassical demand theory converged around a unified set of principles, though still exhibiting a modicum of variation and contestation (Mirowski 2000; 2002; Kirman 2006). Resisting this trend was the economist and psychologist George Katona. Rather than seeking first principles, Katona applied insights from psychology to the study of consumer purchasing and consumer expectations. Katona remains a neglected figure in economic thought and his insights are “conspicuous by their absence in standard macroeconomics texts” (Earl 1990). Sent (2004) locates him within the first wave of behavioral economists, along with Herbert Simon, as an economist who sought to develop an alternative to the neoclassical mainstream. The psychological tradition upon which Katona drew is equally neglected in historical accounts of the disciplinary border-crossing undertaken by economists over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. Katona’s research, not unlike that of the home economists and social economists, offers up a different script for use in writing an alternative history of consumer theory.