ABSTRACT
Half a century ago, a book exploring the value of pluralism in economic inquiry, institutions, and education would have seemed anomalous, particularly in the United States. In the wake of World War II, economists were “covered in glory” (Morgan and Rutherford 1998: 13), having solved many wartime policy problems with their newly acquired mathematical and statistical expertise (Sent 2006: 83). The economist was increasingly regarded as a “neutral, professional scientist, offering expert, value-free advice” (Morgan and Rutherford 1998: 11); and the economists’ new tools – formal modeling, econometric testing, and hypotheticodeductive reasoning – were widely admired as the sine qua non of a rigorous, objective social science (ibid.: 9). Scientific monism thus emerged as the mainline ethos of postwar economics (Weintraub 2002), in marked contrast to the pluralist atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s in which “it was possible to hold a number of different economic beliefs and to do economics in many different ways without being out of place or necessarily forfeiting the respect of one’s peers” (ibid.: 4). Many proponents of scientific monism in postwar U.S. economics saw themselves as freedom fighters. They defended the singularity of Truth and Method as “a wall against irrational and authoritarian threats to inquiry” (McCloskey 1998: 169; Richardson 2006: 14-16).
