ABSTRACT
With microeconomics having established itself as a core component of the discipline of economics – with general equilibrium as its pinnacle – the methodological and other travails of the old marginalism had been forgotten, and the shiny new principles paraded for wider application beyond the dull intersection of supply and demand. At an analytical level, if on its own terms, there is much to commend such ambitions. For the principles of (old) marginalism have always been claimed to be universal, as is indicated by the terminology itself of utility, scarcity, production, and so on, that knows of no inductive content nor historical and contextual specificity. As a result, from a very early stage, there has been the prospect of extending the principles of economic rationality to non-economic arenas. This necessarily raises the question of the relationship between the rational and the non-rational and the relationship between disciplines according to whether these two dualisms do or do not correspond to one another. In other words, how far can we extend the idea of (economic) rationality beyond the market, and what are the implications for the relationship between economics and the other social sciences?
