Anyone who has kept up with literary theory over the past two decades would probably quail at the idea that simple heartfelt apologiae pro sua vitae contain the keys to success in any walk of life, but most emphatically would deny that they play any pedagogical role in academe. Indeed, I myself have been very taken with some work done on the genre of the autobiography, turning a somewhat jaundiced eye on the history of their common structures (Furbank, 1993; Sturrock, 1993). Briefly, and crudely, there are two classes of autobiography: let us call them the Academy Award Speech and the Adventures of a Self-Made Man, respectively. In the first, you are put at great pains to thank everyone from your kindergarten teacher to your shrink for their wonderful communal effort in bringing you to the brink of success and recognition; all hints of envy and struggle and despair and randomness are banished in a warm diffusion bath of responsibility and self-congratulation. Morals are of course drawn, but they inevitably verge on the platitudinous. Anyone who has ever sat through such testimonials realizes immediately that this genre never will be art. At best it can be minor grist for the mills of those who will construct our narrative histories after we are gone.

And then there are the second class of autobiographies, those more substantial Confessions, from Augustine to Rousseau to de Quincy to Hobson to Verlaine to Richard Rorty: the ones that, to varying degrees, can be elevated to the status of art. Here the pattern is decidedly different. Its topos is the story of someone fearlessly opting out of staid convention and the fellowfeeling of mankind to wander in the wilderness and, with success, to return preaching strange and novel doctrines. Intrinsic to the narrative is the conviction that the author is self-made or selftaught (men write these much more often than women: feminists, take note!). "They are likely to tell us of some turn in their experience when they were thrown back on their own resources (like Descartes, alone in his stove-heated room)... rendering them unsociable for the moment, with a need one day to make their terms again with humankind... As a class, they have a tendency to megalomania... For all their self-castigation and earnest proclamations of indebtedness, [these] autobiographers are an arrogant and autarkic bunch" (Furbank, 1993, p.6).

Economists, it seems, inevitably find themselves torn between these two genres. Insofar as they are wont to be team players and happy campers (not to mention reinforcing their reputations as dull and dismal souls), they should opt for the first narrative, pretending that there are uncontentious transpersonal rules and an orderly structure to their discipline, a functional meritocracy of incremental normal science. Yet however much this would seem to be the harsh imperative of academic etiquette (Hamermesh, 1992), economists' own social theories tell them that this communal conception of social life is bunk, that everything that is law-governed springs directly from individual consciousness, that the lonely genius is the only real font of innovation, and that aggressive self-promotion is the law of the jungle. The commonplace fallback of a competitive "marketplace of ideas" best captures this latter temptation to apply their own theories to their own economistic lives, with the coda that the inevitable reintegration into the society of scholars comes in the stylized format of chastened vanquished opponents acknowledging on bended knee the prophet's property/ideas as coin of the realm.

I couldn't possibly produce a plausible version of either narrative-; I just can't summon sufficient faith in either genre, much less the requisite enthusiasm. Because I am not a product of a successful socialization into the economics profession, lots of things that economists say strike me as funny. The idea that we are paid according to our marginal productivity, for instance, rocks me as risible; the tendency to suggest the economy "overheats" is a richly wrought satire. The doctrine that the market maximizes the freedom of a set of agents identical in all relevant respects is a joke worthy of Nietzsche. At the University of Michigan, where I did my graduate degree, the people who worked in the econometric forecasting unit used to call tinkering with unsatisfactory predictions "adding the bump constants." These are fine as harmless entertainments, but turn to ashes in my mouth when I am forced to render an account of my own life.

I have resisted becoming integrated into the 'normal science" practices of the discipline, and I know this has been one common thread connecting the diverse areas within which I have labored. Others sense this instinctively: I am frequently reprimanded in print for my style and tone; some of my teachers in graduate school warned me ominously that I would not fit in; and fellow faculty at Yale cautioned graduate students to keep an assured clear distance from any of my projects while I was a visiting professor there. Now, in retrospect, I can appreciate the kernel of wisdom in all this unsolicited advice. The ingrained stodginess of the social structures of science does serve certain cognitive functions. Asking me now to write on how I feel about economics journals is like asking a lampost to write a memoir on dogs. But the alternate narrative portrayal of myself as a Nietzschean Ubermensch, performing the magic trick of conjuring myself out of thin air, or even more incongruously, the idea of some of my writings as somehow becoming valorized in the marketplace of ideas, is just ludicrous. Anyone who had actually read any of my other stuff would immediately detect an inauthentic note from page one.

Another thread which binds my diverse writings together is an attempt to understand myself as a product of my age through trying to understand economics as a product of the social conditions of its production. This may sound an impossibly misplaced motivation, rather like trying to understand Mozart by studying Freemasonry, or to take the comparison down a notch, Charles Manson by studying the lyrics of the Beatles. Perhaps a surfeit of incredulous reactions will one day convince me of that fact. Yet, until that day dawns, I will continue to be taken with the notion that philosophical discourse is actually a species of veiled autobiography, "the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown" (Nietzsche, 1966, p.13). Thus, when I read a particular economist's advocacy of regarding children as consumer goods, or another insists that Third World countries should be dumping grounds for toxic industrial wastes since life is cheap there, or a third proclaims that no sound economist would oppose NAFTA, or a fourth asserts confidently that some price completely reflects all relevant underlying fundamentals in the market, or a fifth pronounces imperiously that no credible theorist could recommend anything but a Nash equilibrium as the very essence of rationality in a solution concept, I do not view this as an occasion to dispute the validity of the assumptions of their "models"; rather, for me, it is a clarion call to excavate the archaeology of knowledge which allows such classes of statements to pass muster, as a prelude to understanding what moral presuppositions I must evidently hold dear, given that I find them deeply disturbing. However unpopular it may be, I find it hard to understand economics as anything other than a subset of moral philosophy, even though this definition of "philosophy" awaits explication. Thus, by learning about economists and their peccadillos, I learn about myself; discovering how these things work helps me understand How I Work.

Living in the Material World

My little epiphany, which occurred quite early in my career, was to decide that I should provisionally accept their ukase regarding philosophy, and follow them part of the way into their kingdom of preferred legitimacy, namely, Science. This did not mean for me, as it did for so many of them, starting off with a degree in physics or engineering or mathematics; nor did it imply direct recourse to the self-conscious philosophy of science or its bastard offspring in economics, "methodology." Rather, it meant following my own prior inclinations to learn some history of science and history of economics. In this quest, I was fortunate to be encouraged by a few open-minded individuals along the way: Warren Samuels, Gavin Wright, and Lawrence Sklar.

Because this sounds like such a prescription for disaster in modern economics, I want to stress that the whole thing was not the resultant of some decision-theoretic calculation on my part.

I was only dimly aware that by the early 1970s an interest in intellectual history was tantamount to career suicide in academic economics, though things certainly have gotten worse in the interim. I did it simply cut of curiosity. I would never counsel anyone else to follow in my footsteps in this respect, though it has remained an article of faith with me down to the present day to do at least a third of all my reading well outside of economics, and further, to sporadically read randomly, trusting my instincts and keeping copious notebooks in order to trace my way back to any particular node. In a world where it is cute to think that the only famous Ricardo was the second banana on Lucy show, but getting the Euler equation wrong is grounds for getting you booted from the profession, imputing rationality to my actions would be a shameless whitewash. Sometimes I wonder the extent to which my younger self was conscious of living in the material world.

Once I had gained a fair grounding in the history of physics (having also had a few courses in the area), I began to discern a repetitive set of invocations of Science in various economists, and then my ear became attuned to some of their ambivalences and ambages along the way. Luckily, I was living through an era in which belief in any context-independent Scientific Method was being unsentimentally deconstructed, so I did not have to take the various economists' characterizations at face value. I began to understand the extent to which their dependence upon Science was inextricably time-bound, and further, the astounding degree to which they would persistently confuse imitation of the trappings of physics (or lately, biology) with privileged access to the ontological heart of the economy. I still marvel at the extent to which economists openly pride themselves in living in the material world, when they are mostly surrounded by shadows in their own private cave.

Once I had become convinced of the pervasive character of this dependence upon diverse meanings of "science", I became more and more excited, like a kid in a candy store (or some would say: a bull in a china shop); so many of the things about economics which had nettled and disturbed me now had a context and a frame, inviting detailed clarification through comparison of the history of the sciences. Just one product of this reconfiguration of the history of economics which has subsequently attained a modicum of notoriety is my (1989) argument that the "Marginalist Revolution" of the 1870s was no discovery, but rather a fairly straightforward appropriation of the energetics movement of the mid-19th century, with utility being the direct analogue of potential energy, prices the analogue of forces, and the budget constraint a deformed version of kinetic energy. While some have misunderstood the message of More Heat than Light as, "Economics copied physics and that's patently wrong," others have seen that I have tried to raise the issue of what it is that makes certain metaphors and their attendant special mathematics work in some disciplines, and fail miserably in others. Images of physics must be separated out from real physics; children's fairytales about the scientific method must be distinguished from the actual historical practices of real scientists; images of a generic mathematical rigor must be distinguished from actual mathematical arguments. Elsewhere

this has led to the compilation of proceedings of a conference which gathered together other detailed documentations of the use (and misuse) of physical and biological concepts in many diverse areas of economics (1994).

It has been difficult not to let this excavation of physical metaphors come to usurp my entire research life, since it has opened up so many new questions and areas of inquiry. Indeed, I am heartened to observe that some others have seen fit to take up the gauntlet, such as Rob Leonard's exploration of the role of structuralism in game theory, Bruce Caldwell's inquiry into the role of the computer in the socialist calculation controversy, Geoff Hodgson's fine-grained explication of the metaphor of biological evolution in a number of economists, Roy Weintraub's demonstration of the importance of Alfred Lotka and E.B. Wilson for the evolution of the neoclassical stability literature, Michael White's unpacking of the meaning of equilibrium in Jevons, Abu Rizvi's connection of British psychophysics to modern doctrines on the nonrecoverability of neoclassical preferences, Esther-Mirjam Sent's exploration of the importance of artificial intelligence for Tom Sargent's peregrinations, and Paul Christensen's detailed exposition of the importance of Quesnay's training as a surgeon for his innovation of the concept of the circulation of value. But as Arjo Klamer has written in his contribution to the Natural Images volume, this work has yet to get much beyond the stage of, "Look Ma-- a metaphor!" Certainly no one else has felt the force of this observation more than myself. As someone who has gone on record as skeptical of the McCloskeyesque version of a "rhetorical program" in economics, I have come to appreciate how effortlessly

this work might be shrugged off by a profession contemptuous of its history, overtly hostile to philosophy, smug in the trappings of academic success, ready to absorb any intellectual challenge as an analytical special case, and quick to hurl accusations of the genetic fallacy at any of these scholars wishing to reopen consideration of the meanings of Science in practice.

My own response to this situation has been to broaden out the program by constructing specially targeted exercises for very specific subsets of the economics profession. Often this assumes the counterintuitive format of my adopting the persona of the empiricist for the methodologists, the philosopher for the economic historians, the historian for the theorists, and the theorist for disaffected groups of anti-neoclassicals, such as the Institutionalists. Let me give one example of each. As to the first, I have been much concerned of late to address a common objection to More Heat than Light: perhaps mathematical theory has worked itself into various dead ends due to the original physics inspiration, but, goes this objection, one cannot ignore the rich history of empirical endeavors which provides the real backbone and continuity of the economics profession. Since one of the lessons I have drawn from the comparisons with physics is that neoclassicals have been egregiously lax in their commitments to what is indeed conserved or invariant in their portrait of the economy, I have recently begun to address the econometricians on a related malaise which seems to have infected their own bailiwick of late. Using techniques from physical metrology (especially Birge ratios), I show empirically that the

quality of quantitative agreement in econometric estimates of numerical "constants" is far and away inferior to that of parallel endeavors in either physics or psychology. Rather than appeal to inchoate personal conceptions of 'science', we should try to look at their actual track records. This, in an indirect way, calls into question the assumption of existence of the consensual stable empirical base which lies at the center of econometric practice, as well as at the heart of this response to More Heat.

In the next case, I have tried to confront the conviction that Cliometrics has rendered the study of history Scientific in their own terms. I have sought to implement this by writing a standard Cliometric paper on the rationality of wagers by brewers in 19th century Britain, and then rewritten the same paper showing that the path-dependence of econometric estimation does not at all adequately constrain the historical narrative-in other words, by judicious choice of assumptions, I can render the portrait of the historical actors as rational or irrational as I please-- only to then demonstrate that good old-fashioned archival digging serves to restrict the range of interpretation of their behaviors much more perspicaciously than does regression analysis.

An instance of the third presentation would be my recent work on game theory. It is fortuitous to be alive during a juncture when the neoclassical orthodoxy has rapidly shifted its allegiance from Walrasian general equilibrium (I would suggest Marshall was left behind long ago, spooned out only as thin gruel for weak minds in the principles course) to noncooperative game theory as the core doctrine of what it regards as the hallmark of economic expertise. It is during such tectonic shifts that major players feel impelled to comment upon epistemic ruptures, play up or play down the obsolescence of their predecessors, and gear up to rewrite the Whig histories. In the case of game theory, events have moved with such alacrity that no canonical story of the rise and rise of game theory yet exists, though glimpses can be discerned here and there, such as Robert Aumann’s essay (1995). What I and a number of others have tried to is intervene in this process at an early stage and make it a little bit harder to write that standard hagiography where the hallowed progenitor has a number of inconvenient appendages amputated in the interests of a progressive narrative. In particular, we have excavated evidence in (Mirowski, forthcoming) of some of the motivations and concerns of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, showing, for instance, that von Neumann was heavily influenced by twentieth century physics (especially quantum mechanics), disliked neoclassical theory, and was never favorably disposed towards the solution concept of choice of the modern orthodoxy, the Nash equilibrium. Indeed, he anticipated the present fascination with the theory of automata by a half-century. I am not so deluded as to think this will substantially change the behavior of modern game theorists in their quest for the philosopher's stone of rationality, but it may make it more difficult to present their burgeoning program as a “natural” outgrowth of the prior orthodoxy.

Finally, I must confess that there are a small number of self-consciously “theoretical” papers listed in my vita, though I do not hold that abstract genre appropriated from the rhetoric of the physics journal in very high regard. After all, forcing people to write in such an impoverished style is one of the major instruments by which historical consciousness is exiled and the question of the character of science is repressed. Although it may seem quixotic, I have felt it necessary periodically to counteract the common impression that Institutionalist economics is hopelessly a-theoretical (an impression studiously promulgated by the alumni of the Cowles Commission) by insisting that the mathematical character of the practices of economic actors (and not economists) needs a rational explanation, something lacking in every formal economic tradition of which I am aware. In pursuit of this goal I have cribbed together a few underutilized bits of mathematics, like abstract algebra, automata theory, and directed graphs, in order to make and argument that economic value is not intrinsic either in the commodity (as in classical political economy) or hard-wired in the psyche (as in neoclassicism), but is instead socially constructed by the postulation of mathematical invariants where none truly exist. The purpose of such “models” is not to identify equilibria, or any other such vestigial holdover from physics envy, but rather to give an impression of what it is like for an actor to try and read the “meaning” of a transaction where no single correct reading exists. Rather than persisting in the hallowed Western tradition of regarding the mind as a machine, perhaps a renovated formal Institutional economics could come to portray the set of diverse market institutions as algorithmic, undergoing a process of evolution in which people and cultures constitute the shifting environments.

The titillating title of this essay promises confessions, and I realize that I have only been writing little abstracts of my work until now, so here comes my effort to make good on the initial promise. While playing the outsider with each of these groups of economists in a kind of musical chairs is good fun, it really has addled my sense of audience. Always play-acting the other has made it very difficult to have a very good idea to whom I am talking; sometimes I despair at identifying exactly whom I may be influencing and to what end. Do economists care any longer to understand the forces that propel them willy-nilly across the intellectual landscape? Has intellectual history become anything more than high-toned PR about the Next Big Thing to attract funding in an age of downsizing, or an insignificant diversion in the fin de siecle Science Wars? (Horgan, 1997) In my private moments I envy Marx or Hayek or Keynes or (dare I say it?) Milton Friedman, because they had supreme confidence in where they wanted people to end up, and merely adjusted their scientific manner and modalities to get them there in the most efficacious geodesic. (What better way to understand Friedman’s essay on methodology?) I, on the other hand, am still struggling to figure out what it is that moral philosophy is or should be, so that economics might endorse some light at the end of the tunnel. I am reasonably sure it will not consist of yet more baroque epicycles on utilitarianism or ponderous academic pronouncements on ethics or another paean to Nature or empty exhortations towards Truth and Honesty; but beyond that, I am as much in the dark as the next Technocrat or Aesthete. Poverty decimates lives; but what are riches?

No Man Is an Island

I have been trying to write a narrative of my own wanderings, and allegory of what I am, but this is embedded in a narrative of the history of my profession, and allegory of what economics is all about. Just as I have my literary precursors, neoclassicism has its own allegorical account of its true telos. This account can be found in nearly every textbook: it is the story of Robinson Crusoe. In the middle of an indoctrination of the tyro into our science, we find this story, this artful narrative, of what it means to be a neoclassical rational actor. The isolated individual, alone confronting scarcity on his island with his scant endowments, deliberates as to the appropriate combination of goods to maximize his well-being, imposing order upon the primaeval chaos of Nature. As I have intimated before, economists generally don’t read, but they think they know this story cold. The English hosier in the eighteenth century and the American academic in the twentieth understand each other perfectly, describing the inherent transcendental logic of their own system as it spreads across the face of the globe.

But economists really don’t read, and therefore they don’t generally realize that the actual Defoe novel does not underwrite their convictions to any appreciable extent. The man who wrote the following might resist being dragooned into the neoclassical cause:

As opposed to the conviction that there is one invariant Robinson in our culture, the epitome of Art imitating Science, White showed that there were numerous rereadings of Defoe’s novel throughout history, and that the neoclassical textbook Robinson probably dated from the mid-19^th century, roughly contemporaneous with the rise of marginalism in the 1870’s. We might go further and suggest that not only was Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe misread at various junctures for various purposes, but that it has periodically been rewritten in order to codify each generation’s revision of the myth. The version to which neoclassicals seem to be inclined to favor most closely resembles that of Johann Heinrich Campe’s Robinson de Juengere (1779), which was written for children in order to exemplify certain bourgeois virtues. (So the Rational Economic Man is a German folk tale!) Indeed, the novel has been rewritten so many times since that there is even a special term for the genre in German, the Robinsonade. From Johann Wysse's Swiss Family Robinson (1812) to Frederick Marryat's Masterman Ready (1841) to Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (1874) to Jean Giradoux's Suzanne et la pacifique (1922) to William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) to Michel Tournier's Vendredi: ou Les limbes du Pacifique (1967) to Marianne Wiggins' John Dollar, the narrative archetype has been bent and reshaped in so many directions to fit so many changes in concurrent images of Nature and Society in so many cultural contexts, that perhaps one might suggest there is no solid Crusoe there to misrepresent anymore.

Isn't this just one of the characteristics of Art, that it ephemeral and insubstantial, contextual and interpretative, whereas Science is forever? I would like to suggest otherwise. It is no accident that Robinson Crusoe and the mathematics of constrained optimization are yoked together in the same text, for in general they have suffered the same fate. Just as Robinson has been creatively misread and wilfully revised, the physics of the field which represented Hard Science to the late-19th century Western mind has been creatively misread as economics and wilfully rewritten any number of times, from utility to ophelimity to revealed preferences to convex sets to neural nets, and the beat goes on. All that holds them together is a vague family resemblance (and here mathematics as the bearer of inexplicit analogy plays an important role) which does not depend upon anyone actually knowing the physics or understanding the