CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Worku, Karina |
|---|---|
| Title | HOw economics separated as a scientific discipline from Law |
| Summary | What unites both law and economics is their broad domain of inquiry – society. However, within society, the individual is the “basic unit of account”. The term “Homo Juridicus” was coined by Alan Supiot’s in his description of an individual whose identity rests on his/her legal relation to authority. In the West, with the secularization of the political domain “homo juridicus” superseded the theological conception of a human being as Imago Dei (in the image of God) (Supiot, 2007). In general, the common purpose of both of those identities is to represent a certain structure within which an individual acquires an identity since even in the secularized form the individual was conceived as the subject in the sense that he/she was “subjected to the observance of laws” (p.21), divine or “natural”. In contrast, Homo oeconomicus, the birthchild of modern economics which characterizes an individual as a rational, wealth maximizing and self-interested individual, represented an individual as an object and therefore susceptible to scientific inquiry. In looking back at the early development of economics I will argue that it was precisely this conception of an individual which had allowed economics to breakout from the legal and political domains, and with the displacement of scientific concepts helped establish itself as a distinct discipline. |
| Supervisor | Horvath, Julius |
| Department | Economics MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/worku_karina.pdf |
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