This is a working paper version of an essay later published as "Confronting the Science/Value
Split: Notes on Feminist Economics, Institutionalism, Pragmatism and Process Thought."
Cambridge Journal of Economics 27(1), January 2003, pp. 49-64. See
http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/1/49
Confronting the Science/Value Split:
Notes on Feminist Economics, Institutionalism,
Pragmatism and Process Thought
Julie A. Nelson
January 2001
Abstract
What sort of positive changes must economics undergo, if it is to become a more
adequate discipline, useful in the promoting the understanding of systems of provisioning
and exchange, and furthering of survival and flourishing? This essay argues that a
specific break must be made from contemporary mainstream economics at the level of
ontology, or the study of the nature of reality. Drawing on neglected traditions of
pragmatist philosophy and process metaphysics, and some elements of "old"
institutionalist economics and late-twentieth century natural science, it argues that ample
historical precedent and intellectual argument exist for a view of the world as open,
evolving, and permeated with value. Furthermore, feminist scholarship on science offers
an explanation for why such a worldview faces an uphill battle, since it is in conflict with
ideals that have been historically, socially, and psycho-sexually associated with
masculinity.
2
Introduction
The feminist critique of the economics discipline is now well advanced. Feminist
scholars have pointed out the underrepresentation of women among economists; the
relative neglect of the traditionally feminine realms of families and caring work as
subjects of study. Along with a number of other heterodox critiques of the hegemonic
neoclassical school, the feminist critique has noted the distortions caused by using
models centered around the choice behavior of individual, autonomous, self-interested
agents when the phenomena to be analyzed is characterized by complex interconnections
and mutual influence. Similarly, feminist and many heterodox critiques have noted the
inadequacy of closed, static, and/or overly formalized models and the pitfalls of
emphasizing abstract econometric theorizing and "hard" econometric testing, when
contrasted to analysis that includes the concept of emergence and the possibility of real
novelty, with concrete attention to data quality, warranted inference, and systematic
qualitative analysis. By the mid-1990's, feminist work within economics had been
collected in book form by editors such as Ferber and Nelson (1993) and Kuiper and Sap
(1995). It had also taken on an organizational form (the International Association for
Feminist Economics) and journal (Feminist Economics), and had received some limited
opportunity to make its case to the mainstream (e.g., Nelson, 1995).
Having advanced as a critique, two natural question now arise. From those of a
mainstream persuasion, the next natural question is "What do feminist economists
propose as a replacement?" While this question is most often asked in bad faith-prematurely, and by those who will not recognize a replacement model unless it is of the
same form as the original--it can also be asked in good faith. From those of a more
3
critical view, the natural question is "What do feminists contribute, that is not already in
my (Keynesian, Post-Keynesian, Critical Realist, Institutionalist, Marxist, radical,
humanistic, socio-economic, ecological, Austrian, etc.) school?"
Regarding the first question, this article sketches out an argument that an adequate
feminist successor to current mainstream economic practice requires not just changes in
subject matter, methods, or even beliefs about epistemology (i.e., the nature of
knowledge), but even deeper changes, at the level of ontology (i.e., the nature of reality).
Such an ontology need not be invented from the ground up: I will argue that the ontology
required by a feminist economics was presaged by developments in philosophy and
economics earlier in this century, and is supported by past and current developments in
the understanding of the physical sciences. A late twentieth-century convergence of key
elements of feminist and other critical theories, parts of institutionalist economics,
pragmatist philosophy, and process (meta-) physics holds out the hope of social science
that avoids both the Scylla of the bonds of the modernist, mechanical worldview and the
Charybdis of the relativism and subjectivism of the deconstructionist alternative. It does,
however, require doing considerable spadework to expose old assumptions, and then
developing an ability to balance, focus, and act in a world that is not, even in theory,
under our control.
This paper is a sketch of where such analysis might lead. The references to
historical precedents, it should be understood, are not offered in the spirit of an argument
"from authority"--that is, that one should believe the assertions in this paper because
some progressive era economists or current physicists said so. One should accept them,
or not, on the basis of whether they lead to a more adequate and useful discipline. The
4
history is presented here precisely because it is so unknown to most students of
contemporary economics. In U.S. graduate education, at least, all the emphasis is on
formal modeling and testing. Courses in the philosophy of economics and the history of
economic thought are rarely taught, and often triumphalist ("how we have now fixed all
their silly errors") when they are. To note that there was, in fact, an epoch in which
usefulness of knowledge took priority over detached elegance, and that proponents of
such a view were culturally and academically powerful (with some holding full
professorships at places like Harvard and the University of Chicago), may be a source of
energy and inspiration.
The other reason for including a historical analysis regards the second question
posed above, about what feminist analysis can contribute to other heterodox critiques.
From most heterodox points of view, neoclassical economics seems so manifestly narrow
and hidebound, and the critiques so manifestly self-evident and reasonable, that the
inability of critiques to get a fair hearing within the discipline may seem to defy
explanation. This article suggests that the resistance to much critique, and especially
critique at the ontological level involving process and value, has very little to do with
"reasonableness," but rather is rooted in a psycho-sexual conjunction of fears and desires
that permeates not only scientific discourse but personal, social, and political interactions.
The modernist, reductionist foundations of neoclassical economics gain at least some of
their strength, feminists argue, from unexamined associations between certainty, control,
and masculinity on the one hand, and ambiguity, chaos, and femininity on the other. It is
instructive, then, to see how earlier non-reductionist developments came to be covered
5
over and maligned with the rise of positivism. Understanding the role of gender biases in
this process may help in avoiding, if possible, a similar fate for current critiques.
The Institutionalist, Pragmatist, and Process Schools in Retrospect
Institutionalist economics and pragmatist philosophy had their heyday in the U.S.
in the early part of this century, and then fell into neglect and even disrepute. A welleducated economist may be able to tell you that the institutionalist school included the
likes of John R. Commons, Thorstein Veblen, and Wesley Mitchell, but will be less able
to tell you what the school was about. The most likely impression will be of a theory-less
social do-goodism. Institutionalism, especially that of Commons and Mitchell, is
commonly associated with concrete studies of specific industries and with progressive
policies (such as the enactment of worker's compensation insurance), and is often
thought to involve a utopian faith in the beneficence of state intervention. It seems a
backwater in the history of economic thought, superseded, so it would be believed, by a
more rigorously scientific and detached approach, brought on by enthusiasm for elegant
and physics-like mathematical marginal analysis in the 1930's. The names of professional
organizations in which institutionalist work is carried on--the Association for
Evolutionary Economics and the European Association for Evolutionary Political
Economy--may further alienate an uninformed observer, seeming to hearken back to the
days of popular enthusiasm for Darwinian social theory.1 These organizations, while
active and intellectually sophisticated, are small relative to the profession, and most
graduate institutions ignore the school entirely in their staffing and instructional
decisions. Since, in the absence of serious attention to the history of economic thought,
this popular image is all that is known about institutionalism, it is no wonder that few
6
economists take the time to investigate "old" institutionalism further.2 Whether the effect
of the publication of a more sophisticated article on institutionalism into a recent issue of
a mainstream journal (Hodgson, 1998) indicates an upswing in interest remains to be
seen.
Institutionalist economists drew on the writings of, and in some cases personal
contacts with, pragmatist philosophers in developing and justifying their ideas.3
Pragmatism suffered a similar rise and fall within philosophy, though with a partial
comeback in recent decades. An educated philosopher will tell you that the leading
pragmatists, or Classical American philosophers as they are sometimes called, were
Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Many educated philosophers,
however, while perhaps recognizing Peirce as an originator of the field of semiotics, will
dismiss the rest of the school as "vague," insufficiently rigorous, and overly connected
with psychology (James) or education and progressive-era social engineering (Dewey). It
is sometimes thought of as naively optimistic, and associated with notions of
perfectibility of human civilization. The rise of logical positivism by the 1930's led to a
swing towards analytic philosophy, oriented towards more narrow and precise sorts of
questions. Some would argue that the events of WWII put a further damper on optimistic
views of human nature. The continuing sway of analytical thought, however, received a
degree of challenge from W.V. Quine in the 1950's, and more recently from Richard
Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Cornell West whose approaches are regarded as pragmatistrelated. Very recently, an upsurge of interest in pragmatism has led to fresh scholarship in
fields including philosophy, law, and cultural studies (Dickstein,1999; Rosenthal et all,
1999).
7
Process thought, as the philosophy of British mathematician and mathematical
physicist Alfred North Whitehead has come to be called, probably never had quite such a
distinct heyday as the other two schools, but had a period of influence. While
institutionalist economics and pragmatism held temporary sway in areas of the social
sciences and the humanities, Whitehead's work was more clearly directed straight at the
ontology underlying the physical sciences. Some of the limitations to its influence might
come from the fact his emphasis on the organic interconnectedness of reality may seem
too ill-defined and spooky, to those whose notion of science includes abjuring the broad
and difficult in favor of the measurable and explainable. Perhaps it was also limited by
the fact that Whitehead often wrote like...well, a mathematician. What is clear is that
another major developer of this thought, Charles Hartshorne, led it in the direction of
theological questions, a move likely to marginalize it further within modern intellectual
circles (Griffen, 1998). Since process theology challenges the ideal of a transcendent, allpowerful deity, its situation within religious thought has also been problematic. Energetic
but marginalized groups within philosophy (Society for Studies of Process Philosophy)
and theology (Center for Process Studies) have continued to carry the flag. Yet
Whitehead may also have had a direct effect on economics. Some have suggested that
that John Maynard Keynes pre-1910 connection with Whitehead in Cambridge was the
source of Keynes' organicist ontology (Hodgson 1996, 11).4
What was it, about these schools, that fell so out of style? While scholars may
differ in their points of view on this, I locate the central theme as one of seeing the world
being continually in creation, with a balanced ontological importance given to both
stability, order, habit and the past on the one hand, and flux, chaos, novelty and the future
8
on the other. I contend that recovering such an open and balanced worldview, along with
a Whiteheadian notions of worth and value, offers the best path for current development
of an adequate economic science.
Understanding Process and Experience
The common theme among most of the scholars in these schools is the view of the
world as a moving, shifting, even living target for our investigations, with our
investigations themselves contributing to the "moving" forces.
To begin with a contrast, the ontology behind science/value split familiar in
modernism is, on the other hand, one in which mind and matter are considered to be
separate ‘things.’ There is a given reality ‘out there,’ it is assumed, waiting to be known.
Mind is active, but matter is passive. Nature is a machine, an automaton. The rules it
follows give it stability, and to the extent that our minds grasp these rules we gain
increasing mastery over it. As the rules are universal and unchanging, there is no need to
make much of the distinction between the past and future. While values and purposes are
something that humans have and sometimes try to impose, external reality is, in itself,
grey and colorless, and bereft of intrinsic value, subjectivity, or purpose. A recent notable
statement of this point of view is by physicist Steven Weinberg, in his Dreams of a Final
Theory:
[T]he opponents of reductionism...are appalled by what they feel to be
the bleakness of modern science. To whatever extent they and their world
can be reduced to a matter of particles or fields and their interactions,
they feel diminished by that knowledge...I would not try to answer these
critics with a pep talk about the beauties of modern science. The
reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted
as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world
works." (1992, 52-53, emphasis in original)
9
Hence this strain of scientific thought--and we can expand this to technical and economic
thought--purports to objectively describe the world as it is. Our attempts to find religious,
moral, and aesthetic meaning in the universe, in this view, are epiphenomenal and
quixotic, if not downright delusional.
Reactions against this reductionist worldview--notably varieties of romanticism,
humanism, and postmodernism--while rejecting the scientistic view, still often tend to
work with the same science/value dualism--flipping to the other side and/or
"deconstructing" the dualism, but without suggesting a replacement ontology. In place of
an idealization of order, stability, materiality, determinism, mechanism, rationality and
the exigencies of a pre-given nature, many alternatives tend to over-emphasize disorder,
discontinuity, fragmentation, perhaps spirituality, meaning, free will, discourse, aesthetic
or ethical appreciation, emotion, novelty, and/or flux. The science/value split is
problematized, but one is still left awkwardly straddling two seemingly contradictory
worlds, one of the physical space of ordinary experience and the other the realm of
meaning (or, if meaning be rejected, at least of desire).
Taking a very different perspective, in William James' view the real “stuff” of
reality is not thought to be matter, passive and ready-made, but rather experience, defined
as the "immediate flux of life" (James, 1904 [1977], 215). Included in this notion of
experience are not only bare percepta of, for example, color and form (as allowed for in,
say, Humean empiricism) but also experiences of relationships and connections, and
feelings of all sorts. Time is also extremely important here: what we have, at any
moment, is new events or happenings, that are related to past happenings, and that create
the basis for events in the next moment. As William James put it, we "plunge forward
10
into the field of fresh experience" (1907, 112) with our observations and actions
influenced by our beliefs and habits from the past, but also adding to the flux. Instead of
a world of pure laws and ideals lying somehow behind a world of messy interactions and
less perfect actualities, we have, as James wrote, "only one edition of the universe,
unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings
are at work" (1907, 113). The world "becomes" rather than just "is." The world is
unfinished, evolving, open. We are creators in a literal sense.
While the pragmatists emphasized human creativity, in the process philosophy of
Alfred North Whitehead, such activity was more explicitly extended to what we perceive
as the natural world as well. In Whitehead's view, the universe is an organically
interconnected whole. Events or "occasions of experience" take place at the molecular
level and below (though experience does not necessarily imply consciousness), up
through each cell that makes up the organism we call our body, and beyond. Each event,
at any level, is a concrescence of past events and causes, and an occasion open to
spontaneity in the transition to the next. While enduring societies of such events run the
gamut from simple aggregates, like rocks, which have no consciousness, to complex
human organisms in which experience includes mentality and the consciousness of
feeling, these are of a whole. The mineral molecule, present in both the rock and the
body, patterns itself according to mutual interrelatedness of the community with which it
is interlocked. The notion of energy used in physics "must then be conceived as an
abstraction from the complex energy, emotional and purposeful" (Whitehead, 1932,
quoted in Browning, 1965, 331) inherent in the completion of events.
11
To illustrate, consider that in the "block universe" (Dewey 1929, in McDermott
1981, 345) which is considered all completed, we see ourselves as unified Selves acting
out our lives among Things--chairs, tables, etc., with the "essence" of ourselves and the
"thingness" of the things just there. We know who "we" are, the chair is solid, and we
reach into the future with our plans and fantasies. In contrast, in the process universe, all
is abuzz, and all is right now. Who "we" are right now reflects the past and the direction
that, in this moment, our energy decides to go. Studies of the human brain tells us that we
sample reality about 20 times per second--this is the pace of our conscious pulsing. The
chair, like our bodies, is made up of electrons and quarks and other buzzing bits of
energy, each pulsing at their own, much faster, speeds. At every pulse, the electron
"goes" left or right; we start to lift our arm, or leave it be; we keep our attention on a
problem in front of us, or turn it to a plan or fantasy about the future--but only our
planning is real, as the future is yet to be acted out in the organic interaction of all the
buzzing-ness of process. If we experience the power of a strong feeling--a raging anger or
a breathtaking love--this event is felt in the cells of our stomachs and hearts and lungs
and in our consciousness, all of a piece. Likewise, we enjoy the redness of a rose or sense
a purpose to our work.
This ontology leads to the perhaps startling realization that the notion that
reality/matter is colorless, purposeless, and emotionless is an assumption. It is no less a
matter of conjecture (or faith) than its converse. The assumption that matter is senseless
seems so tied up in our notions of science that it may be hard to see that this ontological
view is not required by science itself. Science conceived of as methodical inquiry, as
openness to new evidence, as experimentalism—such a definition does not rely on a
12
mechanistic or reductionist worldview. Such a conception of science is quite consistent
with a view of experience itself as holistic. Because of the limitations of our senses and
our processing abilities, we develop, in everyday life, habits and filters that restrict our
perception of our lived moments. Scientific thought, as inquiry, involves extending our
perceptions and refining our powers of reflection, and as such is both a part of
experience, and a purposive seeking to understand and better our lives through (extended)
experiences.
In a universe conceived of as open, the question of knowledge must be reframed.
Our knowledge is not just about reality, in process thought. Rather, it creatively adds to
reality. And if our knowledge adds to reality--makes a difference--then the question is,
does it make the right difference? Does the "flux…with our additions, rise or fall in
value?" (James, 1907, 112). Values and morals are of the same fabric as science and
economics; not merely incidental.
The notion of values, however, must be carefully redefined. The tendency in the
Western world since the time of Plato has been to think of the actual world going through
time as being a corrupted reflection of ideal forms, which themselves are universal and
time-invariant. We see such thinking in neoclassical economic thought which finds
"behind" the actions of individuals a pure problem in rational choice, and "behind" actual
markets the laws of The Market, impersonal and competitive. In this way of thinking, if
values objectively exist, they must exist as universals, as theoretical invariants, lying out
there somewhere waiting to be discovered. Such notions, however, reflect what
Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." The Platonic views sees what
we experience as illusory, while the universals are real. Whitehead turns this around:
13
what we experience is real, while the categories and concepts we use, from the definition
of a triangle to the notion of Justice, are abstractions and potentials. So, in a process
worldview, there is no blank slate or impartial "spectator" position (to use Dewey's term)
from which universal values will be "discovered." We start with the values and morals
we have. These "are" in exactly the same sense as the world we perceive as physical "is."
As with our physical resources, we tend to rely in large part on habit in a non-reflective
use of them, but we also have the opportunity to try to feel and sense more deeply, and
use our critical faculties more sharply, to increase the wisdom of our conduct.
The reader may be excused if she or he experiences some queasiness at the
notion of such an open, "loose," universe (James 1907, 114). We don't stand, coolly,
outside of nature, probing to find the eternal formulas that could eventually allow us to
control it. We move inside of the maelstrom of nature, creating it as we go, consciously
and responsibly, or unreflectively and irresponsibly. 5
The Contribution from Feminism in the 1980's-90's
Schools of economics and philosophy, and a notion of physics, that were based on
what I call, in shorthand, process thought, were powerful early in the twentieth century. I
will not attempt to explain here, in historical, political, or economic terms exactly why
they were able to rise in influence at this time, or why their influence then died out in
another specific time a few decades later. Rather, I offer here one possible explanation,
on more of a social and psychological plane, of why such thought was vulnerable to
being trumped by a more mechanical, positivist, and reductionist worldview, and why it
still tends to be dismissed without examination.
14
The schools have been dismissed as "vague;" as emotional; as unduly sullying
detached, value-free science with purposeful, committed action and moral values; as
requiring for the creation of knowledge the use of sense, feeling, and attention to the
concrete, instead of only pure computation, formula, theorem, and abstraction; as dealing
with passing impression, rather than only with lasting absolutes; as denigrating human
capabilities by denying the validity of the quest for the certainty of a grand "final
theory." The reductionist worldview has been characterized as tough, hard-nosed,
realistic, and leading towards clarity, precision, certainty and real objective knowledge
and control, while the process, pragmatist and institutionalist views were dismissed as, by
comparison, soft, sentimental, sullied by the acknowledgment of interests, muddy,
contingent, and ineffective.6 Any attempt to include purpose and values could be labeled
as inferior in rigor, and reminiscent of an "old-fashioned" naive, holistic, religious and/or
magical worldview, such as that associated with pre-scientific, medieval alchemy and
witchcraft.7
To these observations, feminist scholarship on the history and philosophy of
science over the last decades years adds the observation that all the qualities on the
highly-regarded side--toughness, abstraction, unchangingness, reductionism, objectivity,
knowing, science--are culturally associated in modern Western thought with masculinity,
while those on the denigrated side--sensitivity, concreteness, changeability,
connectedness, emotion, feeling, "witchcraft"--have feminine cultural connotations. Since
feminists, by definition, reject the idea that on some ideal and essential plane women are
by nature inferior or subordinate to men, questioning such cognitive bias was a logical
sequel to questioning the social bias. Feminist scholars such as Carolyn Merchant (1980),
15
Susan Bordo (1987), Evelyn Fox Keller (1985), Sandra Harding (1986), Brian Eslea
(1980), and later Val Plumwood (1993) and others looked at the role of gender ideology
in the history of the scientific revolution. As put by Harding (1986),
Mind vs. nature and the body, reason vs. emotion and social
commitment, subject vs. object and objectivity vs. subjectivity, the
abstract and the general vs. the concrete and particular - in each case
we are told that the former must dominate the latter lest human life be
overwhelmed by irrational and alien forces, forces symbolized in
science as the feminine. All these dichotomies play important roles in
the intellectual structures of science, and all appear to be associated
both historically and in contemporary psyches with distinctively
masculine sexual and gender identity projects. (1986, 25)
That is, reductionist science has been socially constructed in conformance with a
particular image of masculinity. With the rise of feminism--and also anti-colonial and
anti-racist movements--the denigrated "other" finally, at the close of the twentieth
century, found the voice to challenge this "otherness," on the intellectual as well as the
social, economic, and political planes.
Feminist scholarship does not suggest, as some infer before they engage with it,
that one should turn the tables and reject, say, reason in favor of emotion. Rather, it has
sought to redefine our epistemological understandings in ways that are more adequate to
the search for knowledge, and less hedged around and distorted by an unreflective
emotion-based psycho-sexual urge to be separate and controlling, by the backlash feeling
that anything else is (in a telling choice of words) "impotence" (e.g. Gillott and Kumar,
1997, 38). An important concept is what Keller (1985) called "dynamic objectivity" or
what Harding (1993) called "strong objectivity": our ability to reach beyond our own
subjective experience in claiming knowledge starts not in a stance of mythical
detachment, but with an understanding of our own position and location in the world. At
16
the level of epistemology, feminist theory suggest that the reliability of our knowledge is
tested in the give and take of expanding communities, rather than assured by the
adherence of the individual researcher to specified methods (Longino, 1990). The
viewpoint argued for here is not a viewpoint "of women," as one early variant of feminist
standpoint theory suggested, but rather a viewpoint that includes previously denigrated
dimensions of experience, such as change, emotions, and the sense of moral and aesthetic
value, in the reality to be studied, and even more, recognizes their importance in the
reality to be created.
Such feminist thought, in starting from a viewpoint that scientific endeavors
(including economics) are human endeavors (socially constructed) and hence influenced
by the biases of their times, clearly has a view of dynamic knowledge creation that has
more in common with the process-oriented worldview than with the Platonic or
modernist. On the other hand, it lends to pragmatist, process, and institutionalist thought
something that was not there before: an explanation for why these schools can often be so
easily dismissed. Feminist scholarship suggests that as the tendency to cognitively and
emotionally associate some aspects of the world and qualities of thought with masculinity
and higher value is a form of unmerited bias. The modernists, in setting a high value on
being value-free, were not exhibiting a cool neutrality, but rather a passion for dispassion
(Nelson, 1993), based in a fear of emotion and connection.
Furthermore, since sexist value systems permeate not only intellectual thinking
but also everyday self-perceptions and social, economic, and familial life, a failure to deal
with them on one level is compounded by the problems arising from the others. A
broader sweep of feminist social theorizing suggests that the themes which divide the
17
world into active and passive, doer and done-to, the actor with "power over" and the one
who submits, are also dysfunctional in everyday family life (Evans, 1996) and religious
and social realms (Eisler, 1987). While nearly universally such patterns have included
men on the top and women on the bottom, such scholarship suggests that such patterns
are not inevitable--that alternatives exist which, in place of control and domination,
recognize mutuality and "personal power."
The feminist contribution, then, is not in directly prescribing this or that
methodology. Instead, feminist scholarship invites us to step back and look at the
reasons--psycho-sexual, sociological, and historical as well as logical--for the
attractiveness of certain fashions in ontology and epistemology.8
Neither does the feminist contribution depend merely on uncovering the
contributions that women, or thought concerning women, made to various fields
(although this is a significant endeavor in its own right). The direct contribution of
women to the schools of pragmatist, institutionalist and process thought during the time
of their flourishing was, in fact, quite limited. The leading female figures in
institutionalism and pragmatism were, arguably, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane
Adams, respectively, but neither Gilman nor James were ever admitted to the sorts of
status-enhancing academic positions held by their male peers. Some of the male leaders
were encouraging of their female students and/or supported feminist political actions;
others held explicitly sexist views (see Seigfried, 1996). Could it be that such sexist
views, were the Achilles heel of these schools, bitten into--by a ferocious upsurge of
scientific machismo--in the 1930's?
18
Physical Metaphors at the Millennium
Anthropologist Mary Douglas states that "To acquire legitimacy, every kind of
institution needs a formula that founds its rightness in reason and in nature...There needs
to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is found
in the physical world, or in the supernatural world, or in eternity, anywhere, so long as it
is not seen as a socially contrived arrangement" (1986, 45, 48). The social structure of
modernist, "value-free" science is grounded in a cultural belief that matter is purposeless
and has no intrinsic value. It follows that a new understanding of value in the economic
and social realms is on weak ground unless it also is grounded in a legitimizing metaphor,
one that sees the natural world also as potentially purposive and meaningful.
Institutionalist economists have tended in the past to, along with many others,
grant modernist physical science its own realm on its own terms, while reserving special
qualities for the social and economic realm on the grounds that conscious human actors
are qualitatively different from blind molecules.9 While such an approach can be
satisfying up to a point, it begs the question of how blind molecules could make a
qualitative jump when they are combined in the shape of a human body, a question
usually resolved by positing some form of body/mind, science/humanities dualism.
Neoclassical economics with its unrelenting focus on valueless mechanism therefore wins
the metaphorical game of seeming closer to the "hard" natural sciences--only insofar,
however, as the science in question is the mechanical physics of previous centuries.10
In twentieth century physics, the development of quantum theory, the theory of
relativity, and most recently the study of chaos and complexity reveals that the universe
has non-mechanical, unpredictable, non-linear, seemingly incommensurable, surprising
19
and even "spooky" behaviors. While equilibrium, observability, predictability, control,
simple determinism and continua characterized the seventeenth-century scientific thought
imported into economics, contemporary physics finds these to be only characteristic of
special cases. More generally, disequilibrium, effects of the observer on the observed,
impossibility of prediction and control, jumpy or chaotic processes, emergence and
systems that are more than just the sum of their parts demand non-mechanistic and nonreductionist approaches. Must has been written on this theme at a level directed to an
educated but non-specialist audience (e.g. Briggs, 1989; Gallagher and Appenzeller,
1999), and most readers will be familiar with the notion of that the butterfly's wing flap
on one side of the world can lead to typhoons on the other. Quite turning the idea that
social sciences should emulate the "hard sciences" on its head, physicists Nigel
Goldenfeld and Leo P. Kadanoff write in their introduction to a recent section of Science
entitled "Beyond Reductionism,"
Up to now, physicists looked for fundamental laws true for all times
and all places. But each complex system is different; apparently there
are not general laws for complexity. Instead, one must reach for
'lessons' that might, with insight and understanding, be learned in one
system and applied to another. Maybe physics studies will become
more like human experience. (1999, 89).
Meanwhile the contemporary theoretical physics of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers,
as explained in their The End of Certainty (1996), combines the notion of natural "laws"
(which are now only about probabilities) with the idea that time-irreversible "events" lead
to "an element of radical novelty to the description of nature" (5). Like Whitehead, they
do not see human creativity as opposed to (or as an illusion in the light of) natural
determinism. Rather, their project leads towards "a science that views us and our
20
creativity as part of a fundamental trend present at all levels of nature" (1996, 7), and
which is integrally linked to "the building of tomorrow's society" (185). While it is would
be untrue to claim that the quest for universal laws has been abandoned by all physicists,
or that all physicists see reality as intimately intertwined with value, it is clear that
alternative views are gaining at least a serious foothold. Antonio Damasio, in Descartes'
Error, has offered a widely discussed neurobiological argument for recognizing the
importance of a visceral sense of "quality" (1994, 159): rationality itself, he argues, is
integrally dependent on the healthy functioning of emotions and feelings.
Will explicit recognition of the importance of value and purpose make its way
back into science? Stephen Kellert (1993) draws on feminist theory to argue that the
previous non-treatment of chaotic phenomena in physics was based on "a social interest
in quantitative prediction and dominating control of natural phenomena" (154, emphasis
in original), metaphorically linked to the domination of women. The first step to
recognizing the possibilities of a value-enriched science is the acknowledgment that the
yearning for a purely detached, purely closed and cool view of the universe is itself an
emotional disposition, and, in light of its effects on the possibilities of flourishing life, a
rather unhealthy one.11
Implications for Economics
This feminist-process viewpoint has implications for intellectual practice both at
the levels of theory and at the level of application.
At the level of theory, it opposes an idealism which sees in the world more or less
corrupted forms of universal, transcendent principles, such as, for economics, "Utility
Maximization." This should not be misunderstood as stating that the feminist-process
21
view is opposed to theorizing per se; abstractions and generalizations can be useful-when it is remembered that that is what they are, and they are put to good use. What is
opposed is theorizing that is hegemonic and detached. The feminist-process point does
not judge whether a particular economic model is "right" or "wrong." To state a question
about models that way presumes that models must represent (or fail to represent) some
underlying ideal principles. Rather, the feminist-process point is that we must recognize
that all models are abstractions, which can be helpful or unhelpful. An extreme dyed-inthe-wool neoclassical economist may, for example, expound on how everything in the
world can be thought of in terms of rational choice and scarcity.12 And he (or she) is
correct: one can, as purely a logical and linguistic exercise, find a way to portray
anything in these terms. It may however be damaging--and hence crazy, in a broader
sense of rationality--to insist on reducing a phenomenon to it's choice-theoretic aspects,
and is surely obnoxious and stultifying to insist that everyone else see the phenomenon in
only this way, too.13
While some economists emphasize rational choice models as the core of
economics, others define economics as the interpretation of "The Laws of The Market."
An outstanding example of belief in ideal and inexorable principles of Markets comes
from a recent feature on U.S. President Clinton's economic team written for Time
magazine (Ramo, 1999). The journalist writes, apparently with no sense of irony,
[Robert] Rubin, [Alan] Greenspan, and [Larry] Summers have outgrown
ideology. Their faith is in the markets and in their own ability to analyze
them...Greenspan found in [Ayn Rand's] objectivism a sense that markets
are an expression of the deepest truths about human nature and that, as a
result, they will ultimately be correct...[T]hey all agree that trying to defy
global market forces is in the end futile. That imposes a limit on how
much they will permit ideology to intrude on their actions. (39).
22
Free-market economics is, if one believes this journalist, in touch with the real underlying
"stuff," while views that see anything else as important are merely "ideology." Politics,
nation-states, inequities, concerns for local communities, ecological implications, an
ethos of corporate responsibility (or irresponsibility), compassion, ambition,
discrimination, religious interests, cultural norms and practices, history and institutions,
corruption, and all other factors that might shape economic relations within and between
nations, all fall away into insignificance before the abstract "global market forces." The
hubris demonstrated is rather reminiscent of similar pronouncements in the past in the
physical sciences. Kellert (1993, chapter 5), for example, recounts incidents in which
only those phenomena that could be addressed with Newtonian mechanics or integrable
dynamic systems matters were labeled "important," while observations (e.g. of chaotic
behavior) not analyzable in those terms was labeled "noise" or "subsidiary phenomena,"
and models which attempted to address these were seen as "mistakes."
It is, of course, possible to incorporate some of the ideas of evolutionary
development or the new physics of complexity and chaos theory into economics, without
damaging its reductionist character. Milton Friedman's notion that competition leads to
"natural selection" among firms, for example, was an early example of naive borrowing
from an overly simplistic picture of biological evolution (see Hodgson, 1993, 27;
Tordjman, 1998). It is interesting that the rise of feminist economics in the early 1990's
seems to be roughly coincident with an independent upsurge in interest in applying
complexity theory and evolutionary thinking to economics, as described by W. Brian
Arthur, Steven N. Durlauf and David A. Lane (1997) and Richard W. England (1994).
One variant of this approach, evolutionary game theory, seems to delve deeper than
23
heretofore into the question of how institutions, and even social norms and values,
develop, and generally brings greater sophistication to the question of modeling agents'
rationality and learning (Lesourne, Jacques and André Orléan, 1998; Ben-Ner and
Putterman, 1998; the 1992 special issue of the Journal of Economic Theory ). To some
extent, then, the approach can provide useful tools for undermining the static views or
naive Social Darwinist explanations that underlie the neo-liberal shibboleth of The Free
Market. Yet those working in this direction tend to mimic neoclassical thought in taking a
mechanistic and formalistic approach, often retain "optimization" assumptions (now
perhaps at the level of the "selfish gene"), and, by assuming a pre-set menu of strategies,
leave no room for actually accounting for real novelty, or any space for the possibility of
direction or purposiveness in evolution.14 Can the "the inherent tension between
traditional mathematical tools and phenomena that may exhibit perpetual novelty," as
phrased by Arthur, Durlauf and Lane (1997, 12-13), be resolved? Other contributors to a
critical approach have suggested that the loyalty to mathematical formalisms, which
makes attention to true novelty or purposiveness so difficult, is indicative of an adherence
to Cartesian and positivist views (Hodgson, 1993; England, 1994; Resnick and Wolff,
1994). Feminist theorizing adds to these observations a historical and psycho-sexual
explanation for economists' "arithmomania" (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971, 52). One can
grab onto only the mathematical formulations of evolutionary views or chaos theory,
without paying attention to their epistemological and metaphysical challenges--one is
never forced to take a view of the universe as alive. The mathematical formulations can,
then, precisely because of their difficulty, become just another playground for detached
24
intellects, and a barrier to entry for the many whose interest in economics arises from a
concern with real-world economic problems.15
While the feminist-process view is critical of foundationalist projects such as
modernism, it is just as impatient with forms of pure theorizing of the deconstructionist
sort where criticism of modernist ideals becomes a practice of recreational performance
art tinged by cynicism and inaction. As mentioned earlier, one source of reaction against
progressive era ideals, inasmuch as some formulations tended towards a rhetoric of
human and social perfectibility, came from disillusionment in the face of the evils of
WWII. While the fact that victims of evil may become cynical about notions of
perfectibility is understandable, the cynicism of victors, on other hand-- of those who
would now have something to lose (by reason of class, nationality, etc.)--vis a vis
melioristic social and political change is far less justifiable. The response to evil should
not be merely the invention of new games to assuage intellectual boredom.
The feminist-process view has certain commonalties with, and certain differences
from, the project of "critical realism," as put forth by Tony Lawson (1997) for
economics, based on the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar (1975). The critical realist project
has given more attention to ontological discussion than has feminist economics to date,
and the feminist-process view can be seen as one attempt to fill this lacunae in feminist
economic thought. Orientations shared by critical realism and the feminist-process view
include a concern for ethics and how we live our lives, a search for a non-dualistic
epistemology, attention to the importance of relationships and connections, and a
direction towards openness and emergence. The process solution to the problem of
causality presented by Humean empiricism, however, is rather different from the
25
transcendental solution posited by critical realism, and at least for this reason the two
approaches cannot be considered identical.16
At the level of application, the feminist-process view points towards the
importance of the consequences of knowledge. Since knowledge creation is part of the
creation of, not the detached study of, the world, an intelligent meliorist view is the only
one morally justifiable. Problems of degraded ecological environments, poverty,
discrimination, insecurity, inequality, unfair trade, inadequate labor standards,
irresponsible financial speculation, overbearing concentrations of economic power, and
dependency needs of children, are among those crying out for adequate social science
investigation. Old institutions and habits--such as those arising from the assumption that
the natural world can automatically absorb the wastes of unrestrained industrial
production, or that children and people in other stages of vulnerability will "naturally" be
cared for, at low cost, by unpaid female relatives and underpaid female employees-become dangerously out of date with changing technological, demographic, and social
circumstances. An approach which deals with such problems need not be motivated by
utopian dreams of a perfected society; melioration or even just sheer survival might be
the best for which we can hope. Which sort of approach to questions of knowledge would
you rather try to explain--not to your academic colleagues, who you might feel a need to
"out-tough"--but to your grandchildren?
Conclusion
The feminist-process view presented here sees the world, including the economic
world, as unfinished and evolving, and sees knowledge as adding to that world, for better
or for worse. Science is, thus, intrinsically a matter of value. Yet, one can expect
26
considerable resistance to such a view from those to whom a belief in a static, cold, and
hierarchical universe is emotionally crucial; those who cannot tolerate the notion of flux,
who seek control and mastery instead of creativity and proper management. This essay is
an attempt to inspire more intelligent people to be curious about reclaiming the
progressive bent of "old" institutionalism and pragmatism, updated by late twentieth
century feminism and developments in natural science.
27
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Endnotes
I wish to thank Hella Hoppe and Catherine Keller for providing personal inspiration and
feedback on (respectively) institutionalist and process thought, and Geoffrey Hodgson,
John B. Cobb, Jr., commentators at the July 1999 conference of the International
Association for Feminist Economics, the January 2000 Allied Social Science
Associations meetings, and the November 2000 conference of the European Association
for Evolutionary Political Economy, and anonymous reviewers of this journal, for further
elucidating discussion.
Recent developments in "evolutionary" game-theory will be discussed below. For more
on the history of institutionalism, see, for example, Mayhew (1987), Rutherford (1994).
1
The so called "new institutionalism," arising in recent decades, while admitting the role
of organized economics habits and structures, is largely a variant of reductionist
neoclassical theorizing and as such does not share the philosophical base of the "old"
approach.
2
For example, on the influence of Dewey on Wesley Mitchell and Lucy Sprague
Mitchell, see Seigfried (1996).
3
4
For a recent discussion of Keynes' organicist ontology, see Chick and Dow (1999).
Tony Lawson (1999) has also locates the critical question for feminist economics at the
level of ontology. His "critical realist" project is discussed briefly below, and in
forthcoming work by this author.
5
For a recent statement of these sort of views, see Gillott and Kumar (1997), who
described anti-reductionist worldviews as a submission to, or a "kneeling" before (27),
nature, and as denigrating human abilities and ambitions.
6
Again quoting Steven Weinberg, "At its nuttiest extreme are those with holistics in their
heads, those whose reaction to reductionism takes the form of a belief in psychic
energies, life forces that cannot be described in terms of the ordinary laws of inanimate
nature" (1992, 53), and, regarding religion, "I can see no scientific or logical reason not to
seek consolation by [religious belief] --only a moral one, a point of honor...to resist the
temptation of wishful thinking" (260).
7
Even Steven Weinberg seems to backhandedly acknowledge the emotion-based
grounds for his own pro-reductionism judgments: "The 'negotiations' over changes in
scientific theory go on and on...until finally one view or another bears an unmistakable
mark of objective success. It certainly feels to me that we are discovering something real
in physics, something that is what it is without any regard to the social or historical
conditions that allowed us to discover it" (188, emphasis added).
8
31
For example, John R. Common late in life wrote that
During the stages of the economic science when the economists imitated
the physical sciences, the individual was treated in economic theory like
atoms, molecules...and the like, controlled by external force and not selfcontrolled...[When they] came up against such facts as labor turnover,
trade unions...where laborers had 'wills of their own,' they had to treat
them either as dishonest...or begin to adopt methods of investigation and
understanding based on purposes of the human will instead of the
economic theory of causation by physical forces. (1950, 154-155).
Philip Mirowski, writing on the philosophical bases of institutional economics, sees that
part of the power of the neoclassical model comes from the fact that its Cartesian roots
allow it to "fuse the natural world and the social world into a single coherent entity,"
(1987, 1007), and notes how the fact that pragmatism "has not generally been a popular
epistemology among the physicists" (1987, 1019) left it on weak ground. Mirowski's
analysis of pragmatism and science, while similar to mine in some ways, seems to me to
overemphasize cool logic, Peirce, and mathematical versions of complex systems
(Mirowski and Weagle, 1997), and underemphasize the importance of lived experience,
sensibility, etc.
9
10
Stephen Toulmin (1998) goes even further, arguing that "even at the
outset...theoretical economics [based its] research programs, not on realistic ideas about
the actual methods of Physics, but on their vision of a physics that never was" (329,
emphasis in original). Toulmin's "clinical economics" bears a strong resemblance to the
feminist-process approach proposed here.
One may also recognize elements of process thought in Marxist thought, though much
of Marx's own language also veered towards the mechanistic and scientistic. Going back
even further, one might note strong parallels of process thought to ancient Buddhist
thought, in the images of "becoming," "mindfulness," and "the moment" (see Browning,
1965). Donna Haraway's (1997) "material-semiotic" also bridges the matter-and-meaning
gap.
11
12
Gary Becker's models of family and sexual behavior are the most famous examples.
A critic of the position being advanced here may, of course, point out that notions of
"process" and "experience" are also verbal labels for abstractions, and challenge me to
prove that these are the "correct" abstractions. This, again, misses the point. Whitehead,
for example, makes a distinction between abstractions that are on the "uprise" of
consciousness and those associated with "degeneracy." The former claim "attention,
enjoyment, action, and purpose" and evoke "an energy of self-realization" because they
preserve "adequate relevance to the concrete sense of value attainment" from which they
are derived. Such I hope for the feminist-process view. Degenerate abstractions have lost
touch with their relevancy to the totality and to the attainment of value, and are merely "a
flicker of interest which is destroying its own massive basis for survival." (Whitehead,
1938 [1966], 123)--which sounds like an apt description of contemporary economics.
13
32
Damasio (1994) mentions the value element missing in the mechanistic applications of
such theories: "For most ethical rules and social conventions, regardless of how elevated
their goal, I believe one can envision a meaningful link to simpler goals and to drives and
instincts...[b]ecause the consequences of achieving...a rarefied social goal
contribute...albeit indirectly, to survival and to the quality of that survival" (125,
emphasis added). The mechanistic models include only "survival," but cannot really deal
with the issue of "quality" given their self-imposed abstention from value judgments.
14
15
In my experience, some of the best of the practitioners of the highly mathematical
theories are often quite cognizant of their philosophical implications and the subtleties of
their application. Those that have to struggle to master them, however, seem more likely
to be enthused about their reductionistic application and more likely to want to exclude
from "intelligent" dialog all who do not share their particular hard-won expertise.
16
See Nelson (2000).