Homo economicus and homo politicus: an introduction

Abstract

theorizing, but rather as the relationship has been understood historically through the eyes of contemporary commentators. The four periods under consideration?ancient, mercantilist, classical and neo-classical?are, to be sure, somewhat biased towards what economists would be inclined to regard as the distant past. But the authors make an in teresting case for the proposition that there is considerable continuity with modern public choice/constitutional economics, and that public choice scholarship exhibits intellectual dis positions born largely in the period of classical "separation" of the political from the eco nomic. The title of the Strong paper reflects the specific topic assigned by the conference orga nizers. And, quite properly, he spends a considerable amount of his paper wrestling with what exactly it might mean to compare the "encompassingness" of the political and the economic. It is interesting that he conceptualizes the distinction by appeal to paradigmatic conversations and by reference to whom one "speaks for"?self (economic) or others (po litical). Although rational choice economists may find it a challenging thought that politics is characteristically associated with "an enlargement of the sensibilities", it is worth noting that there is some common ground here with the issue raised in Buchanan's paper on the relation between community and individual. We have chosen to place Ruth Grant's interesting paper last, partly because it strikes us as having the most 'synoptic' quality of all the papers. Using Hirschman's contrast between the "passions and the interests" as a trope, she issues a challenge to applications of the homo economicus method not just in politics but also in market settings. Like other critics of homo economicus, Grant sees the problem less in terms of an excessive similarity in models of political and economic behavior, and more in terms of the impoverished psychology that economists typically use across the board. As already remarked, not all these papers will strike public choice readers as familiar fare?perhaps not even as "fare" at all. But that is, in one way, their point. As Thomas Jef ferson remarks in a not unfamiliar document, there is a general obligation to show "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind". Public choice has plenty of critics?and it is good to develop the habit of respecting their opinions and engaging with, rather than dismissing, them.