Was There a “Vernacular Science of Financial Markets” in France during the Nineteenth Century? A Comment on Preda's “Informative Prices, Rational Investors”
Year: 2006
Type: article
Abstract: In a recent article in this journal, Alex Preda (2004) analyzes the history of financial economics-also called modern financial theory-from a sociology of knowledge perspective and a sociology of science perspective.Preda's article sheds new light on the emergence of financial economic works in the nineteenth century.It explains how models, graphical tools, and theoretical arguments used by academic science had emerged from rationalization and conceptualization developed outside the science.In the process, Preda's article introduced an intermediate step: "vernacular economics," which "is understood to comprise heterogeneous sets of practices, know-how techniques, and rationalization procedures that help social actors make sense of their economic environment and of the economic consequences of their own actions.Rather than a body of homogeneous, abstract, and formalized explanations of economic processes, vernacular economics is grounded in tacit, commonly shared assumptions and knowledge about economic processes" (Preda 2004, 354).In addition, it is "shabbier and not rigorous" and is "oriented toward solving everyday problems, [while] the academic variety is more concerned with elaborating a unified conceptual frame" (354).There is another important criterion to separate these two kinds of economics: the social group that publishes
Source: History of Political Economy
Author: Franck Jovanovic
Institution: Université du Québec à Montréal
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2030028100