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The Romantic Economist

Since economies are dynamic processes driven by creativity, social norms and emotions, as well as rational calculation, why do economists largely study them through the prism of static equilibrium models and narrow rationalistic assumptions? Economic activity is as much a function of imagination and social sentiments as of the rational optimisation of given preferences and goods. Richard Bronk argues that economists can best model and explain these creative and social aspects of markets by using new structuring assumptions and metaphors derived from the poetry and philosophy of the Romantics. By bridging the divide between literature and science, and between Romanticism and narrow forms of rationalism, economists can access grounding assumptions, models and research methods suitable for comprehending the creativity and social dimensions of economic activity. This is a guide to how economists and other social scientists can broaden their analytical repertoire to encompass the vital role of sentiments, language and imagination.

Educated at Merton College, Oxford, Richard Bronk gained a first class degree in Classics and Philosophy. He spent the first seventeen years of his career working in the City of London, where he acquired a wide expertise in international economics, business and politics. His first book, Progress and the Invisible Hand (1998) was well received critically, and anticipated millennial angst about the increasingly strained relationship between economic growth and progress in welfare. Having returned to academic life in 2000, Bronk is now a writer and part-time academic.

richard bronk is currently a Visiting Fellow in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Richard Bronk

London School of Economics and Political Science

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© Richard Bronk 2009

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2009

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Bronk, Richard.
The romantic economist : imagination in economics / Richard Bronk.
                            p. cm.
           Includes bibliographical references and index.
                      ISBN 978-0-521-51384-5
  1. Economics.  2. Romanticism – Economic aspects.
         3. Economics – Philosophy.  I. Title.
                 HB71.B7786  2009
                      330–dc22
                     2008041688

ISBN 978-0-521-51384-5 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-73515-5 paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of my father

John Ramsey Bronk (1929–2007)

The histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy, and are the product of an unenlivened generalizing understanding.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual (1816)

In weakness we create distinctions, then

Believe that all our puny boundaries are things

Which we perceive and not which we have made.

William Wordsworth, Fragment (c. 1799)

Strange as it may seem, if we read History with any degree of thoughtfulness, we shall find, that the checks and balances of Profit and Loss have never been the grand agents with men; that they have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any computable prospect of Profit and Loss, for any visible, finite object; but always for some invisible and infinite one.

Thomas Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1829)

Valuation is expectation and expectation is imagination.

George Shackle, Epistemics and Economics (1972)

Contents