title: Border cases between autonomy and relevance: Economic sciences in Berlin--A natural experiment.
abstract: The faculty of economics at today's Humboldt University in Berlin, as no other institution of economics, has witnessed three radical ruptures in its history: in 1933, National Socialism replaced the pluralism prevailing in the Weimar Republic by imposing a "German economics"; after WWII, GDR authorities replaced this NS regime by imposing a Marxist imperative, which after the fall of the wall was replaced by the Western standards of neoclassical economics. In reconstructing these three reforms, institutional history can serve as a context in which questions about the political nature of economic knowledge can be answered that remain speculative in a conceptual context. I thus present a natural experiment in the political epistemology of economics: How do economists respond to, resist, and stabilize, changing political regimes? How do economists renegotiate the autonomy of economic knowledge given changing demands as of its social task? Among others, I show that contrary to Robert Merton's old, but still widely held thesis in political epistemology-that the values of science are compatible only with democratic regimes-the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes created better conditions for methodological pluralism in economics than democratic society.
authors.affiliation: Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. Electronic address: duppe.till@uqam.ca.
authors.forename: Till
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Düppe
mesh_terms: D001604:Berlin; D030861:Capitalism; D003148:Communism; D004467:Economics / Q000266:history*; D004493:Education; D049673:History, 20th Century; D028683:National Socialism; D011057:Politics; D014495:Universities / Q000266:history*
keywords: Economic science; Humboldt University Berlin; Pluralism; Political epistemology; Science in totalitarianism