ABSTRACT
The rationality principle has long been considered one of the core concepts of economics and has been privileged as a pivotal methodological tenet of economic theorising (Hogarth and Reder 1986; Sugden 1991; Foley 1998; Vanberg 2004). In addition to its centrality in economics the rationality principle has successfully colonised the theoretical heartland of a number of cognate social sciences, including political science and sociology (Friedman 1996; Hechter and Kanazawa 1997). This intellectual colonisation has now been upgraded to the status of ‘economic imperialism’, a term fi rst used by William Souter in 1933 (Souter 1933),1 and fi rmly established by a number of pioneering studies in the 1950s in which the conceptual framework of mainstream economics was applied to a number of different non-economic topics including discrimination, democracy and the economics of slavery (Becker 1957; Downs 1957; Conrad and Meyer 1958). This process of intellectual expansionism continued through the 1960s and arguably culminated in 1976 with the publication of Becker’s The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, which in tone and methodological approach unambiguously conveyed the imperial superiority of the economic approach centred on the theory of rational choice.
