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17 - The realms of the Natural

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2010

Philip Mirowski
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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Summary

One major theme of the inquiry into the place of Natural metaphors in economics is the question of order and how we know whether we have it or whether it has slipped through our grasp. Because the notion of order is frequently treated as an undefined primitive, we find references made to it only obliquely or covertly, often through the use of analogy and metaphor. This volume is devoted to the excavation of metaphors of Natural Order in the history of economic thought, such as orderly ongoing barter compared to celestial mechanics, the orderly capitalist firm conceptualized as a living body, and the orderly profession of bankers as competent physicians. When I first embarked upon my Koch lecture, I thought I might attempt a systematic review of the literature on the role of metaphor and analogy in science, which has grown to enormous proportions in the past two decades. However, a quick perusal of some of this literature convinced me that most writers there were striving to instill a little order of their own in metaphor itself, and I did not relish the prospect of using one fuzzy literature to drape a shroud of obscurity over a separate one. In any event, one of the great attractions of metaphorical discourse is precisely its intrinsic fuzziness, which comes from playing with the notion of identity of two disparate and dissimilar phenomena; and so there seems something willfully perverse about trying to reduce the effulgent effervescence of creative metaphorical confusion to a few simple cut-and-dried categories.

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Natural Images in Economic Thought
Markets Read in Tooth and Claw
, pp. 451 - 483
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1994

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