A rich question coming from an economist, one might think. It's prompted by a book I've been dipping into which is in theory fascinating (to me, at any rate), a sociological history of economics in the US, UK and France from the 1890s to 1990s. Yes, sad anorak that I am, I was looking forward to reading Economists and Societies by Marion Fourcade but am going to have to give up.
The reason it was interesting to me in the first place was that it sets the work we do as economists in the context of our wider cultural and intellectual and institutional environment. It must be true that economics reflects these currents, and yet too many economists can't distinguish between the proper application of scientific method in their empirical work (good) and the idea that economics as it is now is universally and perpetually true (both bad and wrong). As I know well all three countries in this comparative study, I expected illumination.
Oh no! It turns out to be written by an academic sociologist for others in the same discipline. The descriptive country chapters are indeed quite interesting, but the introductory and concluding chapters that surround them have acted more powerfully than a nice mug of Horlicks each evening and sent me straight to sleep. So I can't tell what conclusions to draw from the descriptive accounts. If I were being charitable, I'd blame my own unfamiliarity with the jargon – but I'm not inclined to do so. For the language of sociology does bear far too much similarity to the pretensions so admirably and effectively mocked by Alan Sokal in his spoof of critical theory (see an account of his hoax here). Perhaps someone can point me to the sociologists who don't write so atrociously, but there seem to be few of them. (An honourable exception: Eric Klinenberg's Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.)
My other beef about the book is that it doesn't mention (unless I slept through it) the overwhelmingly obvious sociological fact about economics, which is its domination by men. We await the sociology of our subject's extraordinary gender bias.
“I'd blame my own unfamiliarity with the jargon – but I'm not inclined to do so. For the language of Sociology does bear far too much similarity to the pretensions so admirably and effectively mocked by Alan Sokal…”
In other words, you are trying to legitimize your own ignorance and lack of openness to other intellectual discourses by relying on a successful parody on post modern philosophy. For your information: Foucade is far from being a so-called post-modernist, and so are the thinkers she bases on in her introduction and conclusion. Perhaps you should be a little bit more careful (and humble!) when writing so confidently about a discipline you admit you know practically nothing about.