The history of science has taught us always to remember that the development of a field does not nor cannot occur within an intellectual vacuum. Science by its very nature is a social pursuit practiced by men and women who interact not only with their fellow specialists but with the events of society at large. Dr. Schabas is exploring the ways that economists were influenced by other scientists in the development of their economic theories. It is important to note, though this is not the subject of this research, that the influence was not only one way. Economists affected the development of other sciences--the most famous example is the influence of the economist Malthus on the thought of Charles Darwin. The issues that Dr. Schabas is exploring under this grant are the many different uses of concepts of nature in the major economic texts from the Physiocrats of the mid-eighteenth century to John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century. More specifically, she is tracing the gradual retreat from appeals to nature as economists came to recognize the importance of social institutions in structuring the economy and as they came to set human nature apart from physical nature. This ongoing "denaturalization" of the conceptual foundations was part and parcel of the gradual secularization of science and the general transformation of economics into a science of the mind that came with the Marginal Revolution of the 1870s. To develop these themes, Dr. Schabas is examining these specific topics: 1) John Stuart Mill on the natural/artificial distinction; 2) Concepts of nature in the economic writings of David Hume and Adam Smith; and 3) The privileging of physical nature in the Physiocratic corpus.
