Economics— and History—as Communicative Action

Historians of economics are helping us understand how economic knowledge is made. In concert with trends from the sociology and history of science, historians meticulously examine the practices of economists. But as they have trained their attention to the scales and sites where those stories are told, historians have lost sight of the travels of knowledge beyond lecture halls and scholarly journal pages. To explore that terrain I propose we reconceive scientific practice as communicative action. By studying the social lives of books, pamphlets, and newsprint that cross back and forth the popular and scholarly divide, we can examine how economics participates in the making of mass culture.