A plea for a more unified social science
Introduction by Robert Skidelsky
For too long economists have ignored the implications of ethics, philosophy, history and sociology within their discipline, assuming without question that humans are rational beings whose wants are given. The resulting orthodoxy is incapable of offering any critique of the human hunger for accumulating wealth without limit, and has drastically overreached its scope. Robert Skidelsky’s work is a clarion call for more pluralism within economics and an appeal for a discipline that is sensitive to both the subtleties of human behaviour and the contingency of its own methods.
Robert Skidelsky is the 2019 Fellow of the joint IHS-IWM Fellowship Program. Now an emeritus professor of political economy at Warwick University, he was made a member of the House of Lords in 1991, and is a fellow of the British Academy. Lord Skidelsky is best known for his three-volume biography of the eminent British economist John Maynard Keynes.
The event is part of the regular Seminar organized by the Social Sciences History Platform at IHS.
It takes place in cooperation with IWM.
Please register by email at event(at)ihs.ac.at.