The history of economic thought is generally limited to the history of the economic discipline. As such, it too often ignores valuable contributions to economic thinking developed in the other social sciences. I do not argue that historians of economic thought are blind for developments in other disciplines or that they never engage with them; this conference is a clear proof that this is not the case. Rather, I propose to evaluate the notion that the history of economic thought is only concerned with the ideas of economists. This paper is a plea to broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought with an multidisciplinary approach. More specifically, I advocate for including the following subdisciplines: economic history, economic sociology, economic anthropology, economic geography, and political economy.

Historians of economic thought should not confine themselves to the current institutional categorization of ideas. This is particularly important for the history of ideas about the social dimension in economic life, the focus of this conference. Various subdisciplines, such as economic sociology and economic anthropology, have devoted themselves almost entirely to studying the interaction between social and economic factors. I propose that the boundaries of the history of economic thought should be defined by the subject matter of the thinking, whether certain ideas are about economic matters or not. As such, the institutional location of an idea should be irrelevant as to whether to include it in the history of economic thought. This is similar to how theoretical and methodological approaches are disregarded as criteria for excluding ideas, which is evidenced by the fact that the history of economic thought focusses both on mainstream and heterodox approaches. This is not to say that the history of economic thought should pay no attention to institutional structures. Just as theoretical and methodological approaches are the material of the history of economic thought, institutional developments should have a place, without functioning as exclusion mechanism.

In the paper, the historical development of these subdisciplines, which are outside of economics but study the economy, are discussed. Furthermore, various strands of thought that developed ideas about the social dimension in economic life are discussed in more detail. Below, a short overview of the histories of the subdisciplines of economic history, sociology, geography, anthropology and political economy, is given. After this, a brief outline of the following approaches is given: social network analysis, world system theory, the cultural approach and field theory.

Economic History has its roots in the English historical school of economics. While the German historical school of economics was, at least until the 1930s, successful in fundamentally shaping the economic discipline, in England the historical approach was pushed out of the discipline in the beginning of the 20th century. History features prominently in Marxian thinking and Marxian approaches have also, even since its existence, been a key branch within economic history. In the 1960s, cliometrics arose out of the application of econometrics to economic history and to this day this quantitative empirical branch is important. More recently, an overlapping group of scholars has begun studying legal rules and social norms through a neoclassical lens of utility maximization and is often called new institutional economics. Another highly important intellectual contribution came from the Annales school which originated the France in the 1930s. It consists of a highly diverse group of scholars as they tried to combine economics, sociology, geography, and history. In doing so, it changed historiography by focussing on long term structural developments, lower social classes and collective mentalities, and inspired later new approaches such as world system theory and the regulation school.

Economic sociology has been an important element of sociology since its origins, as many of its founders, such as Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel, wrote extensively on the economy. Economic sociology was revived during the 1980s, partially as reaction to the neoclassical economics imperialism, which claimed to be able to explain sociological phenomena, such as discrimination, marriage, addiction, and suicide, with rational utility maximization in the face of scarcity. The main approaches are social network analysis, neo-institutional and field theory, cultural approaches and performativity theory.

Economic Geography has its origins in 19th century Germany with location theory, which is intellectually closest to neoclassical economics. Economic theory could not ignore space because it fundamentally shapes economic activity. Since the 1970s, the sub-discipline became more diverse with Marxist (also called political economy), feminist, cultural, regulationist and evolutionary approaches. There have also been new neoclassical approaches to economic geography often called new economic geography or geographical economics.

Economic Anthropology arose mainly out of the work of Karl Polanyi as a sub-discipline after the second world war. To understand non-Western and most past societies, Polanyi argued that the dominant neoclassical economic theory was of no help because their economies were not organized on the basis of market exchange. Furthermore, he argued that the concept of ‘free’ markets is wrong because all economic relations are embedded in social institutions. To understand an economy, one thus also has to look at the cultural values, social and political relationships in which it is embedded. Formalists, however, argued that the neoclassical theory of utility maximization under conditions of scarcity, universally applies to all human beings and societies in world history. Since the 1970s various other approaches, such as Marxist, feminist, and cultural (sometimes called anthropological), have become prevalent in the sub-discipline.

The name political economy has been used to describe many different things. It used to be the name for what we today consider as economics. Many Marxian scholars have kept on using the name, while the mainstream discipline switched from political economy to economics. More recently, it has also been used to describe normative economics and public choice, which uses neoclassical theory to study political topics. Here we refer to the subfield within political science called political economy that studies the interaction and interrelatedness between politics and the economy. Marxian approaches have always been an important inspiration for this. But since the 1970s, international political economy arose out of the understanding that the mainly militaristic focussed realist approach within the subfield of international relations, missed the importance of international economic connections and organisations. Another important branch is comparative political economy, which arose mainly out of the varieties of capitalism debate.

Now, we turn to a couple of specific theoretical approaches that pay attention to the social dimension of economic life. This list of approaches clearly could have been longer, but these approaches are selected because they provide useful ideas about the interaction between social and economic factors while existing mainly outside of the discipline of economics, in contrast to for example Marxian and feminist approaches which also have a strong basis in economics.

Social network analysis originated in the beginning of the 20th century in sociology, but has only since the 1980s been systematically applied to economic topics and in doing so it helped initiate a revival of economic sociology. More recently it has inspired economists to focus on networks, done often under the name the economics of networks. Social networks analysis has also some overlap with complexity economics and interacts a lot with the broader academic field of network science. Social network analysis applied to economic topics, started with the idea of looking at how economic life is embedded in social life. Instead of analysing economies as if individuals operate atomistically in markets, the focus lies on social relations and structures in which people interact with each other. As such, social network analysis neither focuses on individuals and their characteristics (such as preferences and rational or irrational behavior), nor on collectives (such as classes and nations). Instead it looks at how networks are structured by analysing the relations (ties, edges or links) between the nodes (which can be people, organizations or things).

World systems theory was initiated by Immanual Wallerstein during the 1970s and continues to have new developments. The main sources of inspiration were dependency theory, Marxian thought, the Annales school, and business cycle theorists such as Joseph Schumpeter and Nikolai Kondratiev. World systems theory is probably best described as a transdisciplinary approach, as it rejects the current categorization of social science disciplines and uses its approach to study topics that are normally considered to be economic, political, social, historical and geographical. As a result, one can find world systems theorists in virtually every social science. The central idea of world systems theory is that the world is organised in a system with rich and power core countries, and poor and weak periphery countries. It combines the idea of dependency theory, that core countries exploit periphery countries by extracting wealth and resources, with the Marxian idea that capitalists exploit workers of the surplus value they produce. As such, world systems theory argues the development of a country is determined by its position in the global division of labor. Historically, certain core countries, while in competition with other core countries, have been able a dominate the world system. This dominance is first mostly economic, in terms of productivity, trade and finance, but later also turns into military dominance. Examples of such hegemonic countries are the Netherlands during the 17th century, the United Kingdom during the 19th century and the United States during the 20th century.

The cultural approach is a broad category which is defined by its focus on the importance of culture in how economies work. As such, it pays attention to the meaning people give to things and how these meanings are constructed and influence economic life. The origins of this approach go back to the beginning of the social sciences, with scholars such as Max Weber, Bronislaw Malinowski and Marcel Mauss. It has many forms and names, such as the culturalist approach, cultural economics, anthropological economics, cultural sociology, and constructivist political economy, which each refer to something slightly different. It should however be noted that it does not refer to the economics of the culture industry, which is a topic, not a perspective. One could also argue that a recent development within this broad category is performativity theory, which has as core idea that economic ideas, such as the approaches described here, do not merely (try to) describe the world, but do actively shape (perform) it. A famous example is Black–Scholes model, which initially described derivatives markets poorly, but after it helped financial regulations to be changed and began to be used by many traders, it did explain derivatives markets very well.

Field theory is a young approach, at least in its application to economic topics, as its first studies were conducted during the 1990s. One could distinguish two main branches of field theory, one located in the US of which Fligstein is a core proponent, and the other in France in which Bourdieu is central. Fligstein his version of field theory overlaps significantly with neo-institutionalism, an approach which has also often been applied in economic sociology, as both emphasize the importance of institutions, legitimacy and the focus of organizations on survival. The core idea of field theory is that actors (people and organisations) orient their behavior to one another within meso-level social orders, called fields. Fields could be seen as social arenas in which constant games of jockeying for position are being played. In this game, it is necessary for actors to understand both the shared meanings and rules of a field and what others are doing, in order to act themselves. The structure of the field and an actor’s position in it, shape the actor’s interests and way of thinking, but do not fully determine it as the actors have the freedom to pursue their own strategies within fields.