ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to provide a history of thinking about the relation between culture and the economy. As we will show, any history of thought about the relation between culture and the economy is also a history of the relation between two versions of economics. Ever since the late nineteenth century, there have always been (at least) two economic sciences (Polanyi 1944). One is the formal economics that we all know from our studies, focused on marginal analysis of individual choices. This is economics in the sense of the study of economizing. The other is the substantive tradition in economic science, focusing on the study of the economy: those segments of society that ensure production, consumption and distribution of goods and services. Whereas culture has no role to play in the former, it has always been a topic of interest in the latter. The fate of culture in economic thought is therefore inextricably tied up with the continuing struggle for dominance between those two paradigms. As long as ‘substantive economics’ was on top, in the form of the institutionalism of authors like Veblen, Commons, or Galbraith, for example, culture could be sure to receive attention. Wherever formal, neoclassical economics reigned, culture disappeared.
