ABSTRACT
I would like to thank Eiman Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela for the opportunity to compose these brief comments in response to the thought-provoking essays by Joseph Medley and Lorrayne Carroll, Jennifer Olmsted, and Nitasha Kaul. An anecdote, if I may, by way of situating the theme of the essay. It has to do with the manner in which the news of the Nobel Prize Award to Amartya Sen was received in some quarters. To many, what he was doing was not real or hard core economics. It was ethics, it was a kind of humanistic politics of advocacy and partisanship. The same sort of controversy occurred, albeit from a different direction, when Herbert Simon won the Nobel Prize in Economics. It was considered by many that he was a cognitive psychologist, and not an economist proper. These disagreements raise profound questions about the nature of disciplinarity and the nature of disciplinary accountability to the ‘world without.’ How is accountability to be calculated and calibrated, and in relationship to what imperatives? Would these imperatives be determined within the ‘relative autonomy’ of the discipline in question, or would it be a matter of responding to pre- and/or extra-disciplinary (what after Derrida (1974) could be called the “hors-texte”) demands and needs? If any discipline decided to go ‘self-reflexive,’ how would that language of critique establish its bite into the ‘primary stuff of the discipline? To put it differently, what would it mean for economics to ‘ethicize’ itself? Would the ethical impulse come from within economics, or would it need to emerge from ‘the outside?’
