Didier Fassin teaches at Princeton at the Institute of Advanced Studies, a high place of “cross-fertilization” between the different disciplines of the human sciences. The text below is taken from the speech he gave on Monday, May 31 in the large amphitheater of the “World”, on the occasion of the presentation of the Prize for the best young economist 2021, awarded each year by the Circle of economists and ” The world “.
Tribune. Not belonging myself to the discipline thus celebrated, I certainly cannot claim a particular competence, but only a curiosity and an interest in economics, and just as much for economists. In this regard, two singular circumstances made me attentive to the evolution of the discipline and to the activity of those who practice it.
First, leading the School of Social Science of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which is open to all knowledge, I wanted the economy to be always represented among the twenty-five researchers who come to spend a year there to write their book or their articles, even in 2020 having chosen as the unifying theme the very Weberian “Economy and Society”.
Then, since our school is traditionally made up of four teaching posts, in anthropology, sociology, political science and economics, I was responsible for leading the recruitment for this last post, which gave me the obligation to read the work of many economists, fortunately being helped in this task by a committee of true experts. My point will therefore be that of an outside observer, naive in a way, who, as such, will dare to comment sometimes astonished.
The extension of the field of economics
Discovering the research carried out by the economists selected for the Prize for the best young economist was a pleasure for me, especially as they demonstrate a commitment to important societal issues, whether criminal justice or democracy. representative, public health or scientific innovation – this list is not exhaustive.
Such eclecticism is indicative of a major development that has been at work for several decades: the investment of economists in subjects that appear far from their initial object, namely properly economic questions – which some researchers, in the disciplines thus visited , even see it as colonization. This extension of the field of economics certainly testifies to the dynamism and creativity of those who practice it. It can however find its limits in two ways: by lack of epistemological criticism and by lack of scientific exchange.
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