The Temporalities of Economics: The Model Form of Economic Theory

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The proposed project investigates the emergence of modeling techniques in economics, in particular econometrics and financial economics, since the second half of the 19th century. At the core of the project is the reconstruction of models of economic temporality as they refer to the problématique, emerging in modernity, of future’s contingency, that is, to the temporalization of contingency. The project starts out from a constructivist reading of sociological theories of societal differentiation, arguing that the emergence of societal subsystems comes along with the crystallization of semantics that not only reduce contingency but also produce a meaning surplus. In the case of the differentiation of economics in the second half of the 19th century, this process materializes in an increasing attention toward mathematical models. These models presuppose the construction of an auto-referentiality based on mathematical symbols which are radically decoupled from any substantial signifier outside the mathematical model, thus enabling economics to produce surplus meaning through the ‘discovery’ of formal patterns in the models. Thereby, the emergence and development of such mathematized economic models is bound up with the necessity to work the temporalization of contingency by making such contingency computable in formal models. The proposed project thus refers to the agenda of the SPP 1688 “Ästhetische Eigenzeiten” through the argument that temporality prominently figures in those models as they attempt to cope with the temporalization of contingency through their specific formal shape. The project’s empirical basis, which will be investigated through a discourse-analytically oriented sociology of knowledge (in particular qualitative content analysis), is a series of turning points in economic modeling, starting out with the marginal utility approach since the 1860s and ending with contemporary discussions in mathematical finance. The genealogical reconstruction of model forms and their temporal implications pays particular attention to challenges and critiques issued against the models and the reactions to those critiques. The data corpus comprises academic publications such as monographs, journal articles, and edited volumes. Equal importance is dedicated to interrelations between economics and other scientific disciplines as they impact on the articulation of economic temporality in the models (for instance, mechanics in the case of marginal utility theory, ecology in the case of equilibrium theory, and psychology as concerns Behavioral finance), as well as to the tracing of ‘successful’ argumentative patterns but also of those which have been left behind (such as, for instance, the marginalization of the theory of rational expectations in contemporary finance).