The Economy of the Word
Language, History, and Economics
Keith Tribe
Reviews and Awards
"Keith Tribe has a message for the economics profession: words matterEL. The prose is interesting and engaging for both the specialist and generalist, and is bound to leave all its readers better educated." Journal of the History of Economic Thought
"Keith Tribe shows that if one pays careful attention to how they were written and how they were read, much can still be learned from re-reading some well-known texts. This book offers a refreshing and original approach to the history of economics." Roger E. Backhouse, The University of Birmingham
"This powerful book offers a learned, penetrating, and beautifully-written account of the creation and development of economics. Sensitive to the issue of the language of political economy, Keith Tribe identifies the key turning points in his reading of the canonical texts of the discipline such as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and Léon Walras's Éléments d'économie pure and shows how these works shaped modern economics. The Economy of the Word is simply one of the best books ever written on the historiography of economics." Loïc Charles, University of Paris 8 and Ined
"Keith Tribe has always been the most interdisciplinary and wide-ranging of scholars, and The Economy of the Word is a compelling challenge to traditional research in every area of economic thought. The result is a remarkable set of essays from Smith to Marx to Walras and after. The Economy of the Word should be read by every intellectual historian and everyone interested in the relationship between social science and history." Richard Whatmore, University of St. Andrews
"Ever since his first book, Keith Tribe has helped to transform the intellectual history of economic ideas by showing us how the history of economic discourse is central to the history and practice of economics itself. Thirty-five years later, his work is still reorienting our understanding, focusing both on the construction of particular languages of economy and economics and its centrality to a proper understanding of the major ideas of canonical works by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Léon Walras in particular. Economy of the Word, provides a powerful defense of what he now suggests is a philology of economics, and its results are both historically revealing and politically profound.
In an age where the rhetoric of economics has a higher premium than almost anything else, he is surely right to say that the languages of economics and of the economy have actually been cheapened, and our understanding of what we are talking about when we use those languages correspondingly weakened. Showing us again the riches and surprises to be found in the real history of economic ideas and its various idioms and iterations, Tribe's exemplary detective work clarifies the meaning behind the words of the past, and in so doing becomes full of interest for thinking about the possibilities of understanding the present." Duncan Kelly, University of Cambridge