The national trajectories of economic knowledge: Discipline and profession in the United States, Great Britain and France

This dissertation takes as its starting point the disjunction between the claims to universality of economics as a discipline, and the empirical observation of the variability of economic knowledge production across countries. Indeed, 'being an economist' stands for quite different institutional and intellectual realities in different nations. Early political and economic histories launched the professional and intellectual forms of economic knowledge production on particular paths, which, in spite of their many transformations over time, we may still identify as long term, and relatively coherent, 'traditions'.;I examine three of these national traditions (the United States, Britain and France) in their development from the end of the nineteenth century up to the present day. I then seek to understand them in relation to the 'polity structures' they are embedded in, by articulating, for each case, the embeddedness of economic knowledge production in a number of key mediating institutional systems defined at the national level: higher education, the state, and the economy. Over time, I argue, these three domains have defined the particular trajectory taken by the disciplinary and professional project of economic knowledge within each national context.;In the United States, understandings of 'what it means to be an economist' have crystallized around the notion of a scientific professionalism rooted in the 'credentializing' power of the university, and rely on the 'relevance' of economic knowledge for a large number of occupational domains in policy and business. In France, professional and intellectual definitions are more segmented, due to the existence of separate and mutually exclusive career tracks for academic and bureaucratic functions. In a nation where sovereignty is traditionally vested in the state, the latter also constitutes the main source of legitimation for the production of economic knowledge. Finally, in Great Britain, the economist's identity has been historically constituted within the broader realm of civil society, and legitimated by the traditional role of the educated (the Oxbridge-London elite in particular) in conducting the affairs of the nation. Both the British and French fields, however, have tended to converge towards a greater acceptance of 'American' professional and scientific norms in the recent period.