Algorithmic economics: A plea for natural economic history

At first sight one might be tempted to regard Mirowski’s latest book primarily as a move away from the conceptual and metaphorical history of economics that one finds in More Heat than Light (Mirowski 1989, 'MHTL'), towards a historiography inspired by recent studies in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). But there is more to Machine Dreams (Mirowski 2002, MD) than meets the eye at first sight. The first two chapters of the book set up the main organising theme of the ensuing narrative. This theme centres on the concept of a 'cyborg.' Originally the result of merging 'cybernetic organism' into a single expression, this theme relates MD to an established science studies literature on 'cyborg science'. Mirowski establishes various strategies of how the discipline of economics reacted to what he calls the 'attack of the cyborgs'. What we are faced in MD are however two approaches to the history of economics, tightly interwoven with each other. On the one hand, MD is a sequel to MHTL. On the other hand though, we find that a significant amount of the research effort underpinning MD was spent not in the library but in the archive, trailing through memoranda, letters, drafts and other communication normally without the ambitions of the conceptual historian. While MHTL entertained anoccasional flirt with the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), in MD this has turned into a liaison dangereux, and an utterly compelling at that.