A supplement to History of Political Economy

Economists and psychologists share an interest in explaining how people make the choices that they do. However, economists have tended to stress individual rationality, shaped by economic motives and expressed in formal logical or mathematical models, while psychologists have preferred to identify influences through experimentation. In recent decades, behavioral economics has bridged the two fields and challenged the traditional economic assumption that individuals choose rationally. The essays collected here provide a longer view and reflect on episodic contact between psychology and economics beginning in the late nineteenth century. They help explain why meaningful, sustained joint inquiry eluded both disciplines for so long and usefully complement the recent inclination of researchers in each field to find inadequacy in the other.

Contributors: Marina Bianchi, Simon J. Cook, Neil De Marchi, José Edwards, Tiziana Foresti, Craufurd D. Goodwin, Judy L. Klein, Harro Maas, Ivan Moscati, John Staddon, Andrej Svorenčík

This book tries to bring together the work of Marx, Freud and Lacan. It does this not by enumerating what might stereotypically be considered to be the central theses of these authors and then proceeding to combine them – a method that is inevitably doomed to failure – but instead by confronting each one of their oeuvres with what might best be described as its extimate core. The work of Marx is confronted with a problematic that implicitly, and at times even explicitly, runs throughout it: that of the splitting, dividing and doubling (or, perhaps better, knotting) of the (proletarian) subject. The work of Freud is confronted – following on from this analysis of Marx – with the hidden social and historical determination of its own most revolutionary insight, that »the nucleus of the ego is unconscious«; and this social and historical determination itself in turn allows for a reinscription of the three fundamental categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.

"The Emergence of Morality in Young Children is one of very few scholarly books concerning the development of moral tendencies in the early years. In its pages, a diverse group of eminent social and behavioral scientists address this fascinating topic and struggle with issues of inquiry that have persistently plagued this field."—Nancy Eisenberg, Harvard Educational Review

"This is a welcome and immensely provocative book. For those of us who favor ethical theorizing done in close proximity to psychology and anthropology, it provides new and illuminating theory and research relevant to perennial debates about the origins of moral sense, its psychological organization, and the objectivity and unity of the moral."—Owen Flanagan, Ethics

The contributors are Augusto Blasi, Lawrence Blum, Judy Dunn, M. Ann Easterbrooks, Carolyn Pope Edwards, Robert Emde, Carol Gilligan, Charles C. Helwig, William F. Johnson, Jerome Kagan, Melanie Killen, Sharon Lamb, Manamohan Mahapatra, Joan G. Miller, Edward Mueller, Richard A. Shweder, Catherine Snow, Elliot Turiel, and Grant Wiggins.