“Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made. Even when I was a student, economics was still part of the moral sciences tripos at Cambridge University. It can claim to be a moral science, therefore, from its origin, if for no other reason. Nevertheless, for many economists the very term “moral science” will seem like a contradiction. We are strongly imbued today with the view that science should be wertfrei and we believe that science has achieved its triumph precisely because it has escaped the swaddling clothes of moral judgment and has only been able to take off into the vast universe of the “is” by escaping from the treacherous launching pad of the “ought.” Even economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.”

—  Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1960s, Economics As A Moral Science, 1969, p. 12

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral…" by Kenneth E. Boulding?
Kenneth E. Boulding photo
Kenneth E. Boulding163
British-American economist 1910–1993

Related quotes

Barack Obama photo

“Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics,”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Remarks on Economic Mobility (December 2013)
Context: It was Adam Smith, the father of free-market economics, who once said, “They who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.” And for those of you who don’t speak old-English let me translate. It means if you work hard, you should make a decent living. If you work hard, you should be able to support a family.

“Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Economics As a Science, 1970, p. 117

“In spite of the moderate usefulness of what the economist has to say on this subject… there is a cry for a cultural anthropologist or even a psychologist when the economist runs into sacred cows, extended families, traditional motivations, levels of achievement, and social morale, all of which may be more important to economic development than any of the traditional economic variables. We still await a true synthesis of the insights of economics with those of other social sciences in the area”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1961). &quot;Contemporary economic research: . In Donald P. Ray (Ed.) Trends in social science. p..19 cited in: Erik Angner &amp; George Loewenstein (2006) Behavioral Economics http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/BehavioralEconomics.pdf <br class="br">1960s

“From Adam Smith through John Maynard Keynes, economics had been mostly talk. At Harvard economics was talk. At MIT, Samuelson made it math.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Part Three, Arbitrage, Paul Samuelson, p. 117
Fortune's Formula (2005)

“But Adam Smith was a philosopher as well as well as an economist, famous in his time as much for his Theory of Moral Sentiments as for The Wealth of Nations. And as he understood so well, society is more than the sum of its individual parts.”

Paul Ormerod book The Death of Economics

Source: The Death of Economics (1994), Chapter 10, Economics Revisited, p. 212

Michael Szenberg photo

“In contrast to the natural sciences, where Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein made their major contributions, most economics masterpieces were written when the authors were middle aged. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman come to mind. However, Paul started much earlier, in his 20s; and, even now, his new articles influence the fields of economics and finance.”

Michael Szenberg (1934) American economist

4.Paul Samuelson is Unique.
Ten Ways to Know Paul A. Samuelson (2006)

“It is not that science proves that the world is not moral. Science as such is not concerned with values, and proves nothing of the sort. Nevertheless, as a matter of history, it is science which has suggested this view to the modern mind by its insistence on mechanistic categories.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

Richard Dawkins photo

“More generally it is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science's turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of universe from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

"When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf", Free Inquiry (1998)

“Proving that profit is economically and morally justifiable, rather then the result of exploitation, has been a central preoccupation of neoclassical economists.”

Jim Stanford (1961) Canadian economist

Part 1, Chapter 4, The Politics of Economics, p. 57
Economics For Everyone (2008)

Bernard Mandeville photo

“The economic doctrine of Adam Smith is the doctrine of Mandeville set out in a form which is no longer paradoxical and literary, but rational and scientific.”

Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) Anglo-Dutch writer and physician

La doctrine économique d'Adam Smith, c'est la doctrine de Mandeville, exposée sous une forme non plus paradoxale et littéraire, mais rationnelle et scientifique.
Élie Halévy La formation du radicalisme philosophique (Paris: F. Alcan, 1901-4) vol. 1, p. 162; Mary Morris (trans.) The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (Clifton, N.J.: A. M. Kelley, 1972) p. 90.
Criticism

Related topics