This book looks backward in order to look forward, or rather it sees economics’ recent past from the point of view of its possible future. Edward Bellamy did this in his highly successful Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (Bellamy, Reference Bellamy1889; Davis, Reference Davis1988), a book that soon after publication sold over 400,000 copies, a vast number only exceeded at the time in copies sold by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s searing condemnation of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe, Reference Stowe1852). Bellamy in 1887 imagined life in future Boston in 2000 and saw that future as a product of its past and one explaining it. The past, he believed, could only be understood in terms of its possible future, and its meaning in itself was empty which by itself only asked one to search even further backward for its dim antecedents. In the years I taught History of Recent Economics at University of Amsterdam, I began by arguing that the present is a history that is open-ended with its future lying ahead depending on choices made today and that we needed to read the present and the past as history in the same way. The mistake often made in much reading of the past is to see it as it appears at its time, done and closed to the future as if people never thought about where things were going. Studying the history of the economics of the present with an undetermined future thus serves as a corrective to much backward-looking thinking in the economics today. It gives us a lens through which we can examine today’s economics. The issue is not where have we come from but where are we going.

This book about the nature and identity of the individual in economics builds upon my two previous books on the individual in economics (Davis, Reference Davis and Klaes2003b, Reference Davis2011) but goes well beyond them in advancing a specific conception of individuals as adaptive – a reflexive capability conception – alternative to the standard Homo economicus utility maximization atomistic individual conception. By reflexive, as I have argued previously, I mean an essential part of what individuals are is that they operate with working self-concepts and a continually developing sense of themselves. A subject only of interest to a relatively small number of scholars? That depends on whether you see people today as simply instrumental calculators without self-awareness or as concerned with who they are.

Mainstream economics’ individual conception is highly idealized and reflects the nature of human individuality in at best a limited way that serves the goal of explaining the social world as a market process. But what it means to be and survive as an individual in an our increasingly complex social world matters to people. It thus seems incumbent upon economics, with its tremendous influence in the world, to do more to explain individual life than it has and seeks to do.

I worry that economics is not only not up to the job of dealing with the future but seems oriented in a backward-looking way on ignoring what the future may bring given its uses in the world. Thus this book aims to make one contribution to reorienting the field in connection with what has long seemed to me to be its most important subject, what individuals are in economic life. My belief is that individual conceptions in economics not systematically grounded in identity analysis are unlikely to provide secure foundations for good causal explanations in economics, and likely to be ideological in promoting policies and normative views more reflective of dominant political thinking. For individuals, identity is paramount. But my more long-range concern is that individuality is at risk, a fragile achievement of our recent history, threatened by many emerging forces. This book will hardly address everything this agenda calls for, but it is an effort in the direction of making thinking about what individuals are in economics a needed focus.