ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 challenges histories of economics in the 1930s and 1940s by suggesting that it was not a period of a univocal transition from economic protoenergetics to cyborg economics as Mirowski (2002) has suggested, but a time of disciplinary warfare. As this chapter explores, agents of different schools of thought perceived and treated each other as rivals. The competition was about making their explanatory tradition more plausible and popular than others. Most historiographies of the period rather focus on finding the history of what later became commonly labelled as ‘economics’ and pay less attention to how agents of rival schools perceived the disciplinary milieu around them and their school of thought. This chapter inquires into this micro-cosmos of economic expertises through the lenses of Polanyi and his correspondents to argue that analysing the subjective realities of interwar economics might reveal untold histories of economics. The chapter includes discussions of Lionel Robbins’ economic science, Hogben’s political arithmetic, the deeply contextualized and socialized accounts of Barbara and Lawrence Hammond, the economic face of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1936) and, of course, Polanyi’s personal economics.
