The Political Element in Economic Thought Philippe Fontaine and Alain Marciano When it awarded Gunnar Myrdal the Bank of Sweden Prize in Eco- nomic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, in 1974, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences described The Political Element in the Develop- ment of Economic Theory as “a pioneering critique of how political values in many areas of research are inserted into economic analyses” (Swed- berg 1990, vii). For those economists who “remained diffident about the volatile intersection between their scholarship and their ideological beliefs” (Bernstein 2001, 17), the above assessment may have been dis- turbing. And when it is remembered that Myrdal had to share the prize with F. A. Hayek, not exactly a detached economist, some might well have reassured themselves by thinking that the prize committee’s deci- sion was after all basely political: a progressive economist on the one hand and a conservative on the other. The phrases “progressive thinker” and “conservative thinker” make sense when they are taken to describe someone’s overall worldview. It may thus be suggested that the progressive or conservative thinker is History of Political Economy 39:4 DOI 10.1215/00182702-2007-031 Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press Correspondence may be addressed to Philippe Fontaine, École normale supérieure de Cachan, Département d’économie, 61, avenue du Président Wilson, 94235 Cachan Cedex, France; or to Alain Marciano, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, Faculté des sci- ences économiques, sociales et de gestion, 57 bis, rue Pierre Taittinger, F-51096 Reims Cedex, France (alain.marciano@univ-reims.fr). Philippe Fontaine and Alain Marciano are grateful to the authors and to a number of referees who all helped improve the quality of the papers presented below. History of Political Economy Published by Duke University Press