ABSTRACT
Economics remains a controversial discipline. Scornfully dismissed in the mid-nineteenth century by Thomas Carlyle as the ‘dismal science’, it still gets a bad press for its poor predictions or its real or supposed ideological bias. Over time, economists have reflected at great length on their claims to understand reality, and the relationship between their theories and models on the one hand and the social and political reality on the other. They have never been neutral observers interested only in objective knowledge. From Adam Smith to the present day, economists have formulated their theories not merely – in the famous words of Marx – to understand the world but to change it. This makes the distrust that has always been shown towards economists not only understandable but justified. The tension between science and politics is an indissoluble part of the discipline of economics and has repeatedly been the focus of methodological reflection. This applies to John Stuart Mill’s distinction between the ‘science’ and the ‘art’ of political economy, it applies to Milton Friedman’s essay about economics as a positive science and it applies to Lionel Robbins’ distinction between pure and applied economics.
